Interest in Spoors bird-monitoring AI software is soaring | TechCrunch

Spoor launched in 2021 with the goal of using computer vision to help reduce the impact of wind turbines on local bird populations. Now the startup has proven its technology works and is seeing demand from wind farms and beyond.

Oslo, Norway-based Spoor has built software that uses computer vision to track and identify bird populations and migration patterns. The software can detect birds within a 2.5-kilometer radius (about 1.5 miles) and can work with any off-the-shelf high-resolution camera.

Wind farm operators can use this information to better plan where wind farms should be located and to help them better navigate migration patterns. For example, a wind farm could slow down its turbines, or even stop them entirely, during heavy periods of local migration.

Ask Helseth (pictured above left), the co-founder and CEO of Spoor, told TechCrunch last year that he got interested in this space after learning that wind farms lacked effective tracking methods, despite many countries having strict rules around where wind farms can be built and how they can operate due to local bird populations.

“The expectations from the regulators are growing but the industry doesn’t have a great tool,” Helseth said at the time. “A lot of people [go out] in the field with binoculars and trained dogs to find out how many birds are colliding with the turbines.”

Helseth told TechCrunch last week that since then, the company has proven the need for this technology and worked to make it better.

At the time of its seed raise in 2024, Spoor was able to track birds in a 1-kilometer range, which has since doubled. As the company has collected more data to feed into its AI model, it has been able to improve its bird identification accuracy to about 96%.

“Identifying the species of the bird for some of the clients, you add another layer,” Helseth said. “Is it a bird or not a bird? We have an in-house ornithologist to help train the model to train the new types of birds or a new type of species. Having deployment in other countries [means] having rare species in the database.”

Spoor now works across three continents and with more than 20 of the world’s largest energy companies. It has also started to see interest from other industries such as airports and aquaculture farms. Spoor has a partnership with Rio Tinto, a London-based mining giant, to track bats.

The company has also received interest in using its tech to track other objects of similar size — but Helseth said they aren’t thinking of pivoting into those areas quite yet.

“Drones are of course a plastic bird in our mind,” Helseth joked. “They move in a different way and have a different shape and size. Currently we are discarding that data but we are getting interest in it.”

Spoor recently raised an €8 million ($9.3 million) Series A round led by SET Ventures with participation from Ørsted Ventures, EnBW New Ventures, and Superorganism in addition to strategic investors.

Helseth predicts that interest in this type of technology will only grow as regulators continue to crack down on wind farms. For example, French regulators shut down a wind farm in April due to its impact on the local bird population and imposed hundreds of millions of fines.

“Our mission is to enable industry and nature to coexist,” Helseth said. “We have started on that journey, but we are still a small startup with a lot to prove. In the coming years, we want to really cement our position in the wind industry and become a global leader to tackle these challenges. At the same time, we want to build some proof points that this technology has value beyond that main category.”