Pattern launched in 2021 with the aim of using computer vision to 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 radius of 2.5 kilometers (about 1.5 miles) and can work with any high-resolution off-the-shelf camera.
Wind farm operators can use this information to better plan where wind farms should be located and help them better navigate migration patterns. For example, a wind farm could slow down its turbines, or even stop them altogether, during periods of intense local migration.
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 monitoring methods, despite the fact that many countries have strict rules about where wind farms can be built and how they can operate because of 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] in the field with binoculars and trained dogs to find out how many birds collide 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 breeding in 2024, Spoor was able to track birds at a distance of 1 km, which has since been doubled. As the company has collected more data to feed its AI model, it has been able to improve its bird identification accuracy to around 96%.
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“By specifying the type of bird for some of the customers, you add another layer,” Helseth said. “Is it a bird or not a bird? We have an ornithologist who will help train the model to train the new types of birds or a new type of species. Having been developed in other countries [means] having rare items in the database.”
Spoor now works on three continents and with more than 20 of the world’s largest energy companies. It is also starting 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 monitor the 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 branching out into those areas.
“Drones are of course a plastic bird in our minds,” Helseth joked. “They move in a different way and have a different shape and size. We’re currently rejecting that data, but we’re interested 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 increase as regulators continue to crack down on wind farms. For example, French regulators shut down a wind farm in April because of its effects on the local bird population and levied hundreds of millions in fines.
“Our mission is to allow industry and nature to coexist,” Helseth said. “We’ve started on this journey, but we’re still a small startup with a lot to prove. In the coming years, we want to establish our position in the wind industry and become a global leader to address these challenges. At the same time, we want to generate some evidence that this technology has value beyond this mainstream category.”
