Surging interest in Spoor's bird-monitoring AI software

Spoor launched in 2021 with a mission to use computer vision in reducing the impact of wind turbines on local bird populations. The startup has now validated its technology and is experiencing growing demand from wind farms and other sectors.

Based in Oslo, Norway, Spoor developed software that leverages computer vision to track and identify bird species and migration patterns. The system detects birds within a 2.5-kilometer radius (about 1.5 miles) and works with any standard high-resolution camera.

Wind farm operators can use this data to make better decisions about turbine placement and adjust operations around migration patterns. For example, a wind farm could slow down or completely stop its turbines during peak local migration periods.

Ask Helseth (pictured above left), co-founder and CEO of Spoor, told TechCrunch last year that his interest in this field grew after discovering that wind farms lacked effective tracking tools, even though many countries enforce strict regulations on wind farm placement and operation due to 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 demonstrated the value of this technology and focused on refining it further.

At the time of its seed raise in 2024, Spoor could track birds within a 1-kilometer range, which has since doubled. As the company gathered more data to train its AI model, bird identification accuracy improved to roughly 96%.

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“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 operates across three continents and works with more than 20 of the world’s largest energy companies. Interest has also emerged from other industries, including airports and aquaculture farms. The company 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 similarly sized objects — but Helseth said they are not yet considering a pivot into those areas.

“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, along with strategic investors.

Helseth predicts that demand for this type of technology will only increase as regulators continue to tighten oversight on wind farms. For instance, French regulators shut down a wind farm in April due to its impact on local bird populations and imposed hundreds of millions in 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.”