Oceans – to state the obvious – are big. This makes it difficult for governments, shipping companies and insurance providers to know exactly what is happening to them at any given moment. It doesn’t help that these modern ships often aren’t equipped with modern technology or the proper software behind these sensors to properly analyze what they’re seeing.
Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, is building a solution to this problem that it calls “SmartMast.” It’s literally a package of weather-hardened sensors, like cameras and radios, that go on a ship’s mast and can relay marine data in real time. Coupled with an analytics platform that can interpret all that information, Quartermaster refers to it as a “continuous, distributed detection network” — a hive mind for millions of ships.
SmartMast is far more advanced than the current standard known as AIS, or “automatic identification system,” according to Quartermaster CEO and founder Neil Sobin. AIS is very basic and consists more or less of relayed position pings. It is also vulnerable. Sobin says Quartermaster’s technology will be less prone to fraud, which can be a big problem on the high seas.
“In shipping, AIS is a completely broken system. [you] Enter your own data and if you want to do anything bad in the ocean, from smuggling to evading sanctions, you can simply opt out of the system or cheat it,” he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “You can take advantage of how fragile it is.”
Sobin spent the past few weeks pitching that pitch to investors, and they rewarded him with a $43 million Series A funding round. The investment, which Quartermaster announced Wednesday, was co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a VC firm that backs “great founders from day zero.”
First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led Uber’s 2010 seed round and is an investor in Flexport, said in a statement that Quartermaster is “reshaping the way shipping companies understand and operate in the world’s oceans.”
“Most attempts to bring intelligence to the ocean have hit the same wall: the cost of custom hardware just isn’t up to par on a planet that’s mostly water. Neil and his team have solved that,” he said.
Quartermaster says more than 600 vessels using SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean to date. The primary goal is to create an infrastructure layer for intelligence applications — identifying other ships, collecting training data for companies working on maritime autonomy, assisting scientists and robotics experts, and providing data and information to governments.
In Sobin’s eyes, there’s almost no limit to how Quartermaster’s system can be used, and the company is already showing new applications of the technology. For example, the company said SmartMast-equipped vessels have already assisted in “more than 20 rescues of seafarers at sea.” This isn’t a revenue-driven opportunity, but Sobin said Quartermaster is constantly thinking of ways to make life better for sailors, especially as it can win more customers.
“It’s work we’re really proud of, but also [those are] the dynamic that helps us lock down our network, you know, and create that incentive for sailors to work with us in that way,” he said. I think there’s a bunch of players in the market trying to sell a sensor to a vessel, trying to sell a sensor to a fleet operator, and I think those are really tough plays because fleet operations are low-margin businesses.”
As for the funding, Sobin said he expects a large portion of it to go toward hiring engineers to continue advancing Quartermaster’s technology. While that money will help, Sobin also believes the opportunity will be too good for some engineers to pass up.
“The ocean has so much low-hanging fruit in computer vision work,” he said. For engineers at social media companies or AI labs, it’s “hard to feel the reward of all your effort. In the ocean, a single engineer can come in and have a significant impact in relatively short periods of time, simply because no one has worked in the space before.”
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