The Quartermaster builds a marine hive mind

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 are often not equipped with modern technology or the appropriate software behind those sensors to properly analyze what they see.

Quartermaster, a startup based in Arlington, Virginia, is building a solution to this problem that it calls “SmartMast.” It is literally an array of weather-resistant sensors such as cameras and radios that are mounted on a ship’s mast and can transmit real-time marine data. Combined with an analytics platform that can interpret all this information, the quartermaster refers to it as a “persistent, distributed sensor network” — a hive mind for millions of ships.

The 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 relay site votes. It is too exhibition. Quartermaster technology will be less vulnerable to fraud, which can be a major problem on the high seas, Sobin says.

“In the maritime domain, AIS is a completely broken system,” he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “It’s an opt-in system, (you) enter your own data, and if you want to do anything nefarious in the ocean, from simple smuggling to evading sanctions, you can simply opt out of the system, or spoof it.” “You can take advantage of how fragile it is.”

Sobin has spent recent weeks reiterating this pitch to investors, and they rewarded him with a $43 million Series A funding round. The investment, which the catering executive announced on Wednesday, was jointly led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a venture capital firm that backs “star-studded founders from day zero.”

The caterer is “reshaping how maritime transportation operators understand and act on the world’s oceans,” seed round partner Bill Trenchard, who led Uber’s seed round in 2010 and is an investor in Flexport, said in a statement.

“Most attempts to bring intelligence to the ocean have hit the same wall: the cost of custom-designed devices is disproportionate to a planet made up mostly of water,” he said. “Neil and his team have solved this problem.”

The quartermaster says more than 600 ships using SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean so far. 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 insights to governments.

In Subin’s view, there are almost no limits to how the catering system can be used, and the company is already rolling out new applications for the technology. For example, the company said that SmartMast-equipped ships have already assisted in “more than 20 rescues of sailors at sea.” This is not an opportunity to increase revenue, but Subin said the caterer is constantly thinking of ways to make life better for the sailors, especially because it might gain more customers.

“That’s the work that we’re really proud of, but also (those are) the dynamics that help us secure our network, you know, and create that incentive for sailors to work with us in that way,” he said. “Our approach is to be pro-sailors and create an incentive for sailors, and I think very few others will know how to operate this model as successfully as we have done. I think there are a bunch of players in the market that are trying to sell a sensor to a boat, trying to sell a sensor to a fleet operator, and I think those offerings are a real challenge, because fleet operations are a low-margin business.”

As for the funding, Subin said he expects a large portion of it will go toward hiring engineers to continue pushing Quartermaster technology forward. While this money will help, Sobin also believes the opportunity will be too good for some engineers to pass up.

“Contour has a lot of low-hanging fruit in computer vision tasks,” he said. For engineers at social media companies or AI labs, “it’s hard to feel rewarded for all their efforts. In the ocean, a single engineer can come in and make a big impact in relatively short periods of time, simply because no one has ever worked in space before.”