Quartermaster is building a maritime hive mind

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.