Quartermaster has raised $140M in a Series B led by Insight Partners, four months after a $43M Series A.
The Arlington, Virginia startup sells SmartMast, a mast-mounted bundle of cameras and radios that streams real-time data off commercial vessels. Founder and chief executive Neil Sobin says the round was preempted rather than shopped, helped along by shipping disruption caused by the war in Iran. About $100M came from Insight, new investor Overmatch Ventures and existing backers including First Round Capital, while $40M arrived as a debt facility from Stifel.
The pitch is the gap left by AIS, the automatic identification system that mostly broadcasts location pings. Quartermaster captures tens of gigabytes a day per vessel, giving shipping lines, governments and insurers a live read on congestion, near-collisions and crews in distress.
The ignored field
More than 650 vessels across 25 countries carry SmartMast and the company has shipped over 800 units. It has doubled manufacturing capacity and is moving from pilot installations to whole fleets.
Insight managing director Nick Sinai calls the network a distributed layer for the ocean, where reliable real-time data has been scarce. Sobin argues maritime AI has almost no prior art, which leaves plenty of low-hanging fruit for a company that owns its own sensor data.
