Quartermaster closes $140M package for ship-mounted ocean data

Quartermaster equips commercial ships with a weather-hardened bundle of cameras and radios that gathers observations at sea and sends them into analytics software. Governments, shipping companies and insurers can use the resulting feed to monitor maritime activity. The Arlington, Virginia startup has closed a $140 million financing package, TechCrunch reported.

The company is trying to make ordinary voyages do double duty. Because SmartMast rides on vessels already at work, each trip adds coverage without Quartermaster operating a surveillance fleet of its own. The system provides more context than the automatic identification system, or AIS, which largely supplies location pings. Potential uses include collision avoidance, shipping-lane monitoring and maritime rescues.

Getting onto those masts depends on a bargain with vessel operators. Tech Funding News reports that hosts contribute space rather than buying SmartMast. Quartermaster pays for the equipment and its installation, then adds at-sea internet and route warnings that give crews a reason to participate. Founder and CEO Neil Sobin has said a conventional hardware sale would be difficult in the low-margin fleet business.

Quartermaster says more than 650 vessels in 25 countries are equipped with SmartMast, while more than 800 units have shipped. TechCrunch attributed much of that difference to fleet deployments that were preparing to start. Hardware awaiting installation is not yet an active network node. Sobin said the company has doubled manufacturing capacity and continues to modify the design for faster production.

More masts do two jobs: widen geographic coverage and generate more proprietary observations for the analytics platform. Sobin told TechCrunch that each SmartMast records tens of gigabytes daily, while Quartermaster and its customers are still finding applications for the data. Unlike a location ping, the cameras and radios capture information about what a vessel encounters during its voyage.

Fishing grounds and shipping lanes with heavy vessel traffic are the next coverage targets, according to Tech Funding News; Quartermaster also plans to hire engineers. The package follows a $43 million Series A closed in May, making the new financing more than three times as large just four months later. About $100 million is equity from Insight Partners, Overmatch Ventures and existing investors, while $40 million is a Stifel debt facility.