Interest in Spoor’s bird monitoring AI software is soaring

Track launched in 2021 with the aim of using computer vision to help reduce the impact of wind turbines on local bird populations. Now the startup has proven that 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 radius of 2.5 kilometers (about 1.5 miles) and can work with any standard high-resolution camera.

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

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

“The expectations of the regulators are increasing, but the sector does not have a great tool,” Helseth said at the time. “Lots of people [go out] with binoculars and trained dogs in the field to find out how many birds are hitting the turbines.”

Helseth told TechCrunch last week that the company has since proven the need for this technology and has been working to improve it.

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

“If you identify the bird species for some customers, you add another layer,” Helseth said. “Is it a bird or not a bird? We have an in-house ornithologist who helps us train the model to train the new types of birds or a new type of species. Deployment in other countries [means] have rare species in the database.”

Spoor now works on three continents and with more than twenty of the largest energy companies in the world. Interest is also starting to emerge 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 technology to track other objects of similar size, but Helseth said they aren’t thinking about focusing on those areas yet.

“In our view, drones are of course a plastic bird,” Helseth joked. “They move in a different way and have a different shape and size. Right now we’re throwing that data away, but we’re getting interest in it.”

Spoor recently raised an €8 million ($9.3 million) Series A round led by SET Ventures with participation from Ørstead Ventures and Superorganism alongside 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 have closed a wind farm in April due to its impact on the local bird population and imposed hundreds of millions in fines.

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