Quartermaster is an Arlington, Virginia maritime intelligence company turning ordinary working ships into a distributed sensing network. Its weather-hardened SmartMast hardware - cameras, radios, satellite links and onboard AI - mounts to vessel masts and streams real-time HD video, geolocation and threat alerts back to a central analytics platform. The result is a live, continuously updated picture of global ocean activity that does not depend on the easily spoofed AIS transponders ships can simply switch off. Backed by a $43M Series A co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, Quartermaster already runs on more than 600 vessels across 25 countries.
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.