This startup raised $43M to build a hive mind for ships | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Oceans — to state the obvious — are big. That makes it hard for governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know exactly what’s happening on them at any particular moment. It doesn’t help that modern-day ships often aren’t equipped with modern technology or the right software behind those sensors to properly analyze what they see. 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. 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 mo