Podcast Episode

Ocean surveillance startup Quartermaster raises another $140M

TechCrunch Startup News

Sep 28, 20266 min

1Transcript1 turns · 6 min

Speaker 10:02

This is Tech Crunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. Listen, your wardrobe is not the only thing that should be changing with the season. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about updating and refreshing your website with new content. And Framer makes that easy to do. Even easier than trying to plan out your next outfit. Framer has everything you need to build and run a website, a canvas tool for design, hosting, a built-in CMS, and AI agents that work alongside you to help bring your vision to the screen. And it's all in one place, so you can stop skipping around to a hundred different apps. You can update your site and have it go live in a few minutes, or build a new one from scratch. Now, I love Framer's powerful SEO tools that have really helped me zero in on my target audience. I can track my traffic through their analytics, and I can optimize my site so that it works across any device. Plus, there's enterprise-grade security to protect all my info. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off. framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Arlington, Virginia-based startup Quartermaster closed a $43 million Series A back in May around its idea of using weather-hardened sensors to capture data and generate insights about maritime activity. That idea has proven popular because Quartermaster has already closed a much larger Series B, bringing in $140 million this time. Founder and CEO Neil Sobin said the round was preempted by software-focused venture firm Insight Partners, and the interest in what Quartermaster is building was helped by the war in Iran and the shipping chaos it caused. Sobin said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, I think we've gained huge amounts of conviction in the core thesis. A big part of the story for us this year was events in the world drive that clarity and drive that conviction and urgency. And when you see that, you've got to seize the opportunity. About $100 million of the Series B came from Insight and new investor defense-focused firm Overmatch Ventures, as well as existing backers like First Round Capital. Nick Sinai, managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement to TechCrunch, Quartermaster is building a distributed network for the ocean, where reliable, real-time data has been difficult to come by. The team's execution and the strong demand for maritime data and awareness made this an investment we wanted to lead, and we're proud to back Neil and the team as they scale to meet the opportunity with commercial fleets. Quartermaster's hardware, which it calls SmartMast, is a fairly straightforward setup. The startup integrates cameras and radios into a package that's mounted on a ship's mast and can capture and relay real-time maritime data. This allows governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know far more than the current standard of AIS, or the Automatic Identification System, which is more or less just a series of location pings. This real-time awareness

2Episode notes

The tech enables real-time awareness for what Quartermaster calls the “largest blind spot on Earth.”

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