Quartermaster is building a maritime hive mind | TechCrunch

Oceans are difficult to monitor in real time because ships and maritime systems often lack modern sensors and software. Quartermaster builds SmartMast, a package of weather-hardened sensors such as cameras and radios mounted on a ship’s mast. The sensors relay real-time maritime data to an analytics platform that interprets the information. SmartMast is described as a continuous, distributed sensing network for many ships. The current standard AIS is characterized as basic, relying on relayed location pings and being vulnerable to fraud. SmartMast is positioned as less susceptible to spoofing and opt-out behavior that can enable smuggling and sanctions evasion. Quartermaster received $43 million in Series A funding.

"SmartMast is far more advanced than the current standard known as AIS, or the "automatic identification system," according to Quartermaster CEO and founder Neil Sobin. AIS is very basic and more or less consists of relayed location pings. It's also vulnerable. Sobin says Quartermaster's tech will be less susceptible to fraud, which can be a big problem on the high seas."

""In maritime, AIS is a completely broken system. It's opt-in, [you] enter your own data, and if you want to do anything nefarious on the ocean, from petty smuggling all the way up to sanctions evasion, you can simply opt out of the system, or spoof it," he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. "You can take advantage of just how fragile it is.""

"Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, is building a solution to this problem that it calls "SmartMast." It's quite literally a package of weather-hardened sensors like cameras and radios that go on a ship's mast and can relay real-time maritime data. Combined with an analytics platform that can interpret all that information, Quartermaster refers to it as a "continuous, distributed sensing network" - a hive mind for millions of ships."

"Sobin has spent recent weeks repeating this 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 "remarkable founders from day zero.""

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