Wind power is surging in Europe, but so are the headaches associated with wildlife protection — which are holding up or shutting down many major wind farm developments, at huge cost.
But one Oslo-based startup, Spoor, has raised an €8m Series A round to solve the problem.
European energy tech VC SET Ventures led the round, with support from EnBW New Ventures, Ørsted Ventures and Superorganism.
Founded in 2020, Spoor uses off-the-shelf security cameras mounted on turbines or survey buoys, feeding constant video into proprietary AI models trained to recognise birds, up to 2km away.
In France, operators have faced fines — and even suspended prison sentences — after protected species collided with blades. In the UK, multi-billion-pound offshore projects have been forced into long planning hold-ups while developers prove seabirds will remain safe.
“They're massive investments, some of these projects are going to power maybe 2m UK homes,” says CEO and founder Ask Helseth. Shutting down a single wind farm for a day can result in up to €1m in lost revenue, he adds; developers are currently budgeting for between 1.5% and 5% of energy production loss due to shutdowns due to birds.
A bird's-eye view
According to Helseth, Spoor’s system has already seen 1.6m birds, processed more than 100k hours of video and more than a petabyte (1m gigabytes) of data. That detection range translates into what Spoor claims is a 100× increase in the volume of airspace monitored compared to existing methods — such as manual carcass searches with dogs and spotters perched beside turbines.
“We spoke to a client not long ago, they had about 50 turbines. They were planning to have one person next to each turbine, for 20 years,” says Helseth.
The technology both identifies and classifies species that regulators care about most. “There are 10k bird species in the world… in any given market between two and 10 birds are of interest,” says Helseth, adding that with an in-house ornithologist, “we're basically, you know, copying his brain.”
With wind capacity forecast to double by 2030, Spoor wants to become infrastructure. “We want to be able to both dominate this market, but also really help it thrive,” he says. The company already works with major wind developers — including Iberdrola, RWE, Vattenfall and TotalEnergies — as well as service providers such as the geodata firm Fugro and turbine OEM GE Vernova.
Longer-term, the same technology could extend to power lines, mining and even drones: “A different type of bird.”
“You can be a small startup, but you can enable huge projects with a huge positive impact,” says Helseth.
