Interest in Spur’s bird-watching AI software is growing

Spur It was launched in 2021 with the aim of using computer vision to help reduce the impact of wind turbines on local bird populations. The startup has now proven the success of its technology and is seeing demand from wind farms and beyond.

Spoor, a Norway-based company, has built software that uses computer vision to track and identify bird groups and their migration patterns. The software can detect birds within a 2.5 km (about 1.5 mile) radius and can work with any off-the-shelf HD 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 can slow down its turbines, or even stop them entirely, during periods of heavy local migration.

Ask Helseth (pictured above left), co-founder and CEO of Spoor, TechCrunch said Last year, he became interested in the field after learning that wind farms lack effective tracking methods, although many countries have strict rules about where to build wind farms and how to operate them due to local bird populations.

“Expectations from regulators are rising, but the industry doesn’t have a great tool,” Helseth said at the time. “A lot of people go out into the field with binoculars and trained dogs to see how many birds hit the turbines.”

Since then, the company has proven the need for the technology and worked to improve it, Helseth told TechCrunch last week.

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

For some clients, specifying the type of bird adds another layer, Helseth said. “Is it a bird or not? We have an in-house ornithologist to help train the model to train a new species of bird or a new type of species. The spread to other countries (means) there are rare species in the database.”

Spoor now operates across three continents and with more than 20 of the world’s largest energy companies. It is also beginning 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 technology to track other similarly sized objects, but Helseth said they are not considering focusing on those areas yet.

“Drones are of course a plastic bird in our minds,” Helseth joked. “It moves in a different way and has a different shape and size. Currently we are throwing away that data but we care about it.”

Spoor recently raised an €8 million ($9.3 million) Series A funding round led by SET Ventures with participation from Ørsted Ventures and Superorganism as well as strategic investors.

Helseth expects that interest in this type of technology will 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 local birds, hundreds of millions in fines were imposed.

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