PersonFounderExecutive
Neil Sobin
Neil Sobin is the founder and CEO of Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia company turning working ships into sensing nodes for a global maritime intelligence network. Its SmartMast hardware bolts weather-hardened cameras and radios onto vessel masts, runs AI at the edge, and stitches the feeds into a live picture of the open ocean. After building distributed networks at Hivemapper and AI infrastructure at Scale AI, Sobin raised a $43M Series A in May 2026 co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, with more than 600 vessels already covering 10 million square miles and assisting 20-plus rescues.
neil sobinquartermastermaritime intelligencesmartmastdistributed sensingdefense tech