Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia startup building a sensor network for the ocean, has raised $140M in a Series B. Insight Partners and Overmatch Ventures led about $100M of equity, joined by First Round Capital, with a $40M debt facility from Stifel.
The round arrived fast. Quartermaster closed a $43M Series A in May around the same idea, and founder Neil Sobin said Insight preempted this one. He credits part of the appetite to the war in Iran and the shipping disruption it caused, which sharpened customers’ sense of urgency.
The hardware is called SmartMast: cameras and radios bundled into a unit bolted to a ship’s mast. Each one records tens of gigabytes a day and relays live maritime data, giving governments, shipping companies and insurers a far richer picture than the automatic identification system vessels have relied on.
Sobin calls the ocean the largest blind spot on Earth. The obvious uses are collision avoidance, spotting congestion in shipping lanes and locating lost mariners, but he says customers keep finding new ones, and that there is little prior art in maritime AI to copy.
More than 650 vessels across 25 countries carry a SmartMast, and the company has shipped over 800 units, a gap that reflects fleets about to be equipped wholesale. Quartermaster has doubled manufacturing capacity and keeps refining the design for faster production.
Insight managing director Nick Sinai described the investment as a bet on real-time maritime awareness, a market where reliable data has been scarce.
