Quartermaster is building a maritime hive mind

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 these 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.