As bird protection becomes a wind-industry priority, Spoor secures €8 million to meet rising demand

Spoor, an Oslo-based startup that leverages AI to help wind farms monitor and protect wildlife, announced it has secured an €8 million Series A investment round to support further global expansion and new hires.

The round was led by European EnergyTech VC SET Ventures, with additional participation from EnBW New Ventures, Ørsted Ventures and Superorganism. The company is also backed by major Nordic investors, including Futurum Ventures and the state-owned climate fund Nysnø.

“Our technology has reached a point where it can deliver the accuracy and reliability that wind developers have been waiting for,” says Spoor CEO, Ask Helseth.

In 2025, European investment activity in AI-driven biodiversity and wildlife-monitoring technologies has been steady, with NatureMetrics in the UK securing €24.3 million to advance its eDNA-based biodiversity monitoring platform and Flox in Sweden raising around €1 million to expand its AI tools designed to reduce human–wildlife conflict.

Against this backdrop, Spoor’s €8 million Series A round positions the Norwegian company within a clearly developing niche where AI is increasingly applied to environmental compliance and ecosystem intelligence.

Altogether, these 2025 investments amount to approximately €33 million, reflecting sustained investor interest in solutions that support both climate-infrastructure growth and biodiversity-protection requirements.

“Developers already rely on Spoor as a seamless part of their operations, and this funding allows us to grow our team and deepen our integrations with wind farm control systems. The industry is moving toward 24/7, data-driven intelligent wildlife protection, and we are ready to support that shift at a global scale,” adds Helseth.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Ask Helseth and CTO Helge Reikerås, Spoor provides real-time bird and bat monitoring software for wind developers and operators. Using its database of over 1 million bird observations, Spoor’s patented computer vision models integrate directly into wind farm control systems to detect, classify and track birds down to the exact species from long range.

Because Spoor uses a small number of off-the-shelf cameras instead of expensive proprietary hardware installations, deployments can reportedly be completed faster and at lower cost. With detection ranges far greater than most conventional systems, Spoor’s technology can monitor up to 100 times more airspace per camera, enabling faster and significantly lower-cost deployment across wind farms.

This push for scale comes at a critical time for the wind industry.

According to data provided by the company, today’s 1.3 TW of installed wind capacity is expected to reach 2.1 TW by 2030, representing about 810,000 new turbines. At the same time, at least ten countries have mandated continuous wildlife monitoring for wind farms in the last 5 years. Mitigation and Shutdown on Demand (or SDoD) rules are now standard in markets including Germany, Poland, Spain and much of the USA.

Spoor holds existing contracts in both pre- and post-construction phases with Ørsted, RWE, Vattenfall, TotalEnergies, Equinor, GE and Fugro.

“We already see that Spoor’s digital, software-driven solution is replacing manual processes, as well as expensive radar systems and high-end proprietary (thermal) camera installations that exist today,” says Julia Padberg, Partner at SET Ventures. “With long implementation cycles and conservative procurement behaviour, trust is difficult to earn in the wind sector, but with​ contracts across the entire lifecycle of a project with 20+ top-tier customers, it’s clear that Spoor has crossed that threshold. We’re excited to help the company scale even further.”

Spoor is scaling from early deployments into long-term post-construction contracts at the same time that biodiversity regulation is becoming a standard rather than an afterthought.

With global wind capacity expected to double by 2030, developers face growing pressure to deliver clean energy while meeting strict biodiversity rules, yet many lack accurate, continuous and affordable monitoring tools to do so. This is precisely where Spoor looks to make a name for itself.

“Bird monitoring is a major challenge for wind farm developers and operators, and is mandated by regulations in many markets, from permitting through to operation,” shares Anke Gratz, Investment Manager at EnBW New Ventures. “Spoor’s solution stands out through AI-driven data analysis, leveraging an extensive database of over 200,000 hours of video footage to train models with high accuracy, and is easy to deploy thanks to the use of off-the-shelf cameras. We’re delighted to back Spoor in developing products that help the wind industry balance clean energy generation with the protection of biodiversity.”

The wider 22-person team is set to expand significantly with this funding, with new hires planned across sales, engineering, and deployment to support product development and delivery capacity.

“This marks a new phase for Spoor,” says Helseth. “We’re growing from early- stage projects into long-term partnerships with some of the world’s leading wind developers. Our focus now is scaling responsibly, strengthening the team, deepening our integrations, and delivering on the trust our customers have placed in us.”

Spoor was also included in our 2022 article highlighting 10 super promising Norwegian startups to watch in 2022 and beyond.

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