Arlington, Virginia-based startup Quartermaster in May closed a $43 million Series A around its idea of using weather-hardened sensors to capture data and generate insights about maritime activity. That idea has proven popular, because Quartermaster has already closed a much larger Series B, bringing in $140 million this time.

Founder and CEO Neil Sobin said the round was preempted by software-focused venture firm Insight Partners, and the interest in what Quartermaster is building was helped by the war in Iran and the shipping chaos it’s caused.

“I think we we’ve gained huge amounts of conviction in the core thesis,” Sobin said in an exclusive interview. “A big part of the story for us this year was, events in the world drive that clarity and drive that conviction and urgency, and when you see that, you gotta seize the opportunity.”

About $100 million of the Series B came from Insight and new investor, defense-focused firm Overmatch Ventures, as well as existing backers like First Round Capital. The remaining $40 million came in the form of a debt facility from investment bank Stifel.

“Quartermaster is building a distributed network for the ocean, where reliable, real-time data has been difficult to come by,” Nick Sinai, managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The team’s execution and the strong demand for maritime data and awareness made this an investment we wanted to lead, and we’re proud to back Neil and the team as they scale to meet the opportunity with commercial fleets.”

Quartermaster’s hardware, which it calls “SmartMast,” is a fairly straightforward setup. The startup integrates cameras and radios into a package that’s mounted on a ship’s mast, and can capture and relay real-time maritime data. This allows governments, shipping companies and insurance providers to know far more than the current standard of AIS, or the “automatic identification system,” which is more or less just a series of location pings.

This real-time awareness data creates all kinds of opportunities for what Quartermaster calls the “largest blind spot on Earth.” Everything from helping ships avoid collisions, to better understanding congestion in shipping lanes, to rescuing lost mariners is on the table. Sobin said each SmartMast records tens of gigabytes per day, and the startup and its customers are still finding new uses for the data being captured.

“There isn’t a lot of prior art in maritime AI, and so it’s been exciting to, one, have our own source of data,” he said. “But two, there’s just so much low hanging fruit that we’ve been knocking down this summer in what you can start to build and then deliver value for our customers on.”

Sobin said the startup spends a lot of time engaging with people across the maritime industry — and not just vessel owners and operators — in order to find out what they want out of this technology.

“This is an ignored field. Mariners around the world have been ignored by technology for a really long time, and so when they meet us, they’re so excited, because they’re like: ‘Oh, I have so many ideas, let’s work on them’,” he said.

More than 650 vessels are now equipped with SmartMast in 25 countries, Sobin said, and the startup has shipped over 800 to customers. That gap is largely driven by the fact that Quartermaster is about to start deploying the SmartMast system to entire fleets, a sign that early adopters are really buying into the idea.

Quartermaster has had to hustle to keep up with demand, Sobin said. The startup has doubled its manufacturing capacity and continues to tweak its design so its hardware can be manufactured at a quicker clip.

“We know we can do this, and we are seeing a lot of proof that tells us we’re really onto something massive and important in the world,” Sobin said. “So, what do you do when you have that position? You run faster and you move faster and you double down on that strategy.”

After more than a decade building a caller ID business serving over 500 million users, Truecaller is now taking the scam intelligence it gathered along the way to the open web, with no app or sign-in required.

The Swedish company on Sunday launched Scam Checker, a new web and Android service that lets users paste in a suspicious phone number, link, or message to find out if it’s fraudulent. To work, the service surfaces related reports from Truecaller’s community, ScamFeed. However, more detailed information about a phone number, including the name associated with it, remains available only through Truecaller’s existing service, which requires a sign-in.

The free-to-access tool will initially be available in India and is set to expand to Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Southeast Asia, the company said.

In addition to serving as lead generation for its app, the community reports can give Truecaller a better view of the scams circulating at a given time. This could also help the company with its fraud and risk products sold to enterprises through Truecaller for Business, although Jhunjhunwala said Scam Checker itself is aimed at consumers.

To work, Truecaller’s Scam Checker checks the link the user submits, expanding shortened URLs and following redirects to the final destination. It then checks these against its proprietary risk database and other fraud signals. Users can also paste a suspicious message, allowing the service to pick out a phone number or link and surface related reports from the Truecaller community.

The launch comes as scams have grown well beyond phone calls to text messages, messaging apps, and web links. In a 2025 GSMA survey of Indian adults (PDF), 46% of those who reported being scammed said they were approached through messaging apps, while 37% via SMS and 32% through voice calls.

Truecaller estimates that people make about 14 million web searches a month to check suspicious links and phone numbers, based on its analysis of search volumes and traffic to existing verification services. That behavior helped shape Scam Checker, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala told TechCrunch.

“When you need it, you’re usually somewhere else. The link shows up on WhatsApp. Your mum gets a message about a traffic fine. A friend forwards you a screenshot and asks, ‘Is this real?’” Jhunjhunwala said. “What people do in that moment is search.”

Truecaller’s community is becoming a crucial piece of its scam-detection effort. The company told TechCrunch that about 20,000 scam reports are live on ScamFeed, its crowdsourced feed where users can post and discuss scams, in India, with around 1,300 new reports added each week. Between September 14 and 20, the company also said it evaluated 12.9 billion messages globally and flagged 20.3 million as fraudulent.

In the near future, Truecaller says it plans to broaden the types of scams Scam Checker can detect and add screenshot uploads for further analysis.

The company’s push beyond caller ID comes as its core business faces new pressures in India, its largest market with more than 350 million users. Telecom operators are rolling out the federal government-backed Calling Name Presentation service, while Apple and Google have added their own caller identification and spam-protection features. Last week, India’s telecom regulator also ordered caller-ID apps to share user-submitted spam reports with telecom operators, a move Truecaller criticized as a “one-way exchange.”

As a result, Truecaller’s focus is evolving beyond caller ID.

“Caller ID was the first problem we solved, and it’s still how most people find us,” he said. “But scams moved to a more multi-channel approach with links and messages, and increasingly to voice and video. Our protection has to follow the scammer.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seems to be everywhere this weekend: He was lampooned on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, and tonight, he’s set to have dinner with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Axios first broke the news of Amodei’s dinner plans, which were subsequently confirmed by other publications.

This will be the first one-on-one meeting between the two men, who recently found themselves on opposite sides of the AI safety debate. Amodei released a plan to slow AI development (or at least proceed with more caution), while Trump has insisted, without evidence, that the AI backlash is a Democratic hoax; he also wants to rebrand the technology as “super intelligence.”

Even before the current back-and-forth, Amodei and Anthropic have to had a fraught relationship with Trump’s administration. Earlier this year, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in response to the company’s attempt to put guardrails around the use of its technology (Anthropic has been fighting the designation in court), although other administration officials have been friendlier.