The Infrastructure of Wildlife Protection

Wildlife protection is starting to move beyond monitoring. A new group of companies is building technology that can directly improve the outcome for a specific species or animal group.

Some intervene when animals come into conflict with infrastructure. Others improve the health of managed populations or help restore damaged ecosystems. What connects them is that the product does more than observe the problem. It is designed to change what happens to the animal.

This landscape follows startups building these direct intervention technologies across birds and bats, pollinators, terrestrial wildlife and coral.

Birds & Bats

What is this category about?

• This category covers technologies that reduce bird and bat deaths caused by human infrastructure. Wind farms are the main market because rotating blades create a direct collision risk. The same problem also exists around airports and industrial facilities where the goal is usually to keep animals away from dangerous areas without harming them.

• The first problem is that wildlife risk is difficult to observe continuously. Traditional surveys depend heavily on fieldwork and only capture what happens during a limited period. Bird movements can change throughout the day, while bat activity can be difficult to observe at all. Operators therefore need systems that can watch a site continuously and identify when animals enter a risky area.

• Detection alone does not solve the problem. Wind operators need to intervene before a collision happens, but shutting turbines down whenever wildlife might be present would reduce electricity production. The challenge is to identify moments of real risk accurately enough that intervention can be selective.

• There is also a growing need to prove what happened after a project becomes operational. Developers may need evidence that mitigation measures are working or that protected species are not being harmed beyond permitted levels. This turns wildlife monitoring from an occasional environmental study into an operating function that can continue throughout the life of the asset.

What do products in this category do?

• The most common product model is continuous automated monitoring. The logic is to replace periodic observation with a system that can see wildlife whenever it appears. Spoor uses computer vision to track birds around wind farms and reconstruct their flight paths. IdentiFlight uses fixed camera stations that identify individual birds as they approach turbines. These systems give operators a much more detailed picture of when collision risk actually exists.

• Some products connect detection directly with the turbine because monitoring has limited value if nobody can react quickly enough. IdentiFlight can send a curtailment request when a protected bird approaches a turbine. DTBird follows a similar logic but can also use acoustic deterrence before stopping the turbine. Bioseco develops systems around the same principle. The product becomes a control layer that tries to protect wildlife while keeping the turbine running whenever risk is low.

• Another approach tries to change the animal’s behavior instead of changing the operation of the infrastructure. This is useful in places where operators want birds to avoid an area entirely. Bird Control Group uses automated lasers that create a visual stimulus birds perceive as dangerous, causing them to leave the protected zone. DTBird uses sound for a similar purpose around wind turbines. This model also works outside renewable energy because it does not depend on turbine control systems.

• The monitoring data is increasingly becoming a product itself. Once cameras are collecting large amounts of wildlife activity, customers can use the information for environmental reporting and future project decisions. Spoor turns video into validated flight data that can support wind farm assessments. DTBird gives customers access to monitoring results through its NEST platform. This makes the same system useful before intervention is required and after the project is already operating.

What types of customers are using these products?

• Wind developers and operators are the core customers. Their immediate problem is often getting a project permitted and then showing that it can operate without unacceptable wildlife impact. Ørsted has deployed Spoor at Borssele in the Netherlands. RWE has used the technology at Kaskasi, while Vattenfall tested it at Aberdeen Bay. Red Rocket has installed Bioseco systems at wind farms in South Africa.

• The products are increasingly used on offshore projects. Monitoring birds far from shore is difficult to do through normal field surveys, which makes automated systems particularly useful. Deep Wind Offshore commissioned Spoor for a multi year monitoring project around Utsira. DTBird has been installed on the DemoSATH floating wind platform, where its data continues to be used for environmental studies.

• Airports are another established customer group because birds create a direct safety problem around aircraft. Bird Control Group has supplied its laser technology to Frankfurt Airport and Southampton Airport. In this market the economic logic is different from wind energy. The customer is not trying to satisfy environmental requirements but to reduce the probability of bird strikes.

• Industrial operators use the same technology when birds interfere with physical infrastructure. Hyundai Steel adopted Bird Control Group systems at one of its facilities in South Korea and later purchased additional units. Total E\&P Nederland also supported the development of a system for offshore installations. These examples show that species protection technology can sometimes solve an operational problem at the same time as it protects the animals.

What are the major trends shaping this category?

• The underlying wind market is getting much larger. Global wind installations reached a record 165 GW in 2025, bringing total capacity to 1,299 GW. Almost 28,400 new turbines were installed during the year. Every additional project creates another site where wildlife impact may need to be assessed and managed, so the addressable market for monitoring grows with the wind industry itself.

• Offshore wind should make automated wildlife monitoring more important. More than 9 GW of offshore wind was connected in 2025, and GWEC expects more than 300 GW of additional capacity could be installed over the coming decade. Monitoring wildlife at sea is inherently harder than sending observers to an onshore site, which strengthens the case for persistent camera based systems. U.S. energy research has also expanded from land based wind toward offshore wildlife interactions.

• Curtailment is becoming more precise. The traditional approach is to stop turbines during periods when bats are likely to be active, but this also sacrifices electricity production when no bats are present. Smart curtailment uses actual wildlife activity to decide when intervention is needed. The U.S. Department of Energy already describes real time monitoring as a way to reduce unnecessary curtailment, while recent federal project guidance explicitly recognizes algorithm based and real time acoustic approaches.

• Wildlife protection remains tied directly to the ability to build and operate wind projects. In Europe, renewable projects must remain compatible with requirements under EU nature legislation, and the Commission maintains specific guidance for wind development. Better monitoring therefore has value beyond conservation because it can reduce uncertainty around project approval and compliance.

How does the funding environment look?

• Spoor is the clearest venture backed company in the category. It raised a $4 million seed round in 2024 and followed it with an €8 million Series A in 2025. The important signal is not only the amount. Ørsted Ventures participated in both rounds, which shows that a major wind developer sees enough value in the technology to invest alongside financial investors.

• The older hardware companies followed a different financing path. DTBird has little disclosed venture funding, while Bird Control Group received meaningful support through European innovation programs. They were able to commercialize products without raising the successive institutional rounds that are common in software. This suggests that customer funded deployment and public innovation capital have historically been important sources of financing in this market.

• There is not yet a broad venture funding wave across bird and bat protection. The strongest VC activity is concentrated around newer monitoring platforms that can scale through software and serve large wind operators. More hardware heavy businesses appear able to build durable companies, but their financing profiles look closer to specialized industrial technology than conventional venture backed climate software.

Bees & Pollinators

What is this category about?

• This category covers technology that helps keep pollinators healthy and makes agricultural pollination more reliable. Most commercial products focus on honeybees because colonies can be moved between farms and actively managed. This gives technology companies a direct way to intervene rather than simply observe a decline in wild populations.

• One problem is that the health of a colony is difficult to understand without opening the hive. Beekeepers traditionally inspect colonies manually, which becomes expensive when hundreds or thousands of hives are spread across large areas. Continuous monitoring can identify problems earlier and reduce the amount of routine inspection required.

• Keeping colonies alive is becoming harder. Varroa mites remain one of the biggest threats to managed honeybees, while existing chemical treatments can lose effectiveness. Disease creates another source of colony loss. This is pushing the market toward products that actively protect bees rather than only helping beekeepers manage their work.

• Growers also have surprisingly little visibility into the pollination service they are buying. Hives may be placed in an orchard, but the grower cannot easily tell how strong the colonies are or whether bees are actually reaching the crop. This creates an opportunity to turn pollination from a largely logistical service into something that can be measured against crop outcomes.

What do products in this category do?

• A first approach is to turn pollination into a managed service supported by real-time data. The logic is that growers ultimately care about successful pollination rather than simply renting a certain number of hives. BeeHero monitors colonies during the pollination season and measures activity in the field so growers can understand how pollination is progressing. Ubees combines connected hives with managed programs where hive placement can be adjusted using field data.

• Another approach automates the care of the colony itself. This exists because commercial beekeeping becomes difficult to scale when every hive requires frequent human inspection. Beewise replaces the traditional wooden hive with BeeHome, where a robotic system monitors colonies and can perform routine interventions remotely. The product effectively moves part of the beekeeper's work inside the hive.

• Some companies focus on a specific cause of colony loss rather than automating the whole hive. Vatorex targets Varroa mites by heating the brood area to temperatures that harm the parasite without killing the bees. Its system automates the treatment inside the colony, reducing dependence on chemical miticides.

• Biotechnology offers a different form of intervention. Instead of detecting a disease after it appears, the aim is to make the colony less vulnerable to it. Dalan Biosciences commercialized a vaccine against American foulbrood, giving beekeepers a preventive tool for a disease that can otherwise force the destruction of infected colonies. This moves bee health closer to the animal health model already common in livestock farming.

What types of customers are using these products?

• Large growers are the most direct customers for precision pollination. Their economics can change materially when pollination improves crop yield, which makes it easier to justify the cost of monitoring. Ubees has worked on avocado production in Colombia and has deployed its technology in crop programs across several countries. Beewise has also published results from commercial almond orchards in California.

• Commercial beekeepers are another important customer because they manage enough colonies for automation to matter. Beewise sells BeeHome around this problem, while Vatorex provides beekeepers with a more targeted way to manage Varroa. Dalan sells its bee vaccine to commercial beekeepers in the US and Canada, including through certified queen producers.

• Food companies are starting to become buyers or partners because pollination happens inside their agricultural supply chains. Nespresso has worked with Ubees to deploy connected hives among coffee farmers in Colombia. Ubees has also worked with Nestlé and other brands on programs where pollination becomes part of a broader agricultural sustainability project.

• There are early signs of demand outside farming. Beewise partnered with Metro Development Group to deploy BeeHome at the Angeline residential development in Florida. In this case, the buyer is using bee infrastructure as part of the environmental management of a property rather than to improve a crop.

What are the major trends shaping this category?

• The pressure on commercial honeybee colonies remains unusually high. USDA researchers investigating the major US losses reported in early 2025 found viruses associated with Varroa mites across affected colonies. They also found signs that the mites had developed resistance to amitraz, one of the main treatments used by beekeepers. More than 60% of US commercial colonies were reported lost between the previous summer and early 2025, representing roughly 1.7 million colonies. This makes alternative forms of mite control much more economically relevant. (ARS)

• Pollination is becoming something agriculture cannot simply assume will be available. Around 75% of the world's major crop types depend at least partly on pollinators, while pollinators affect roughly 35% of crop production by volume. FAO also notes that agriculture has become more dependent on pollination as cultivation of pollinator-dependent crops has expanded. This increases the value of technologies that can make pollination more reliable rather than treating it as a free natural input. (FAOHome)

• Governments are starting to require much better measurement of pollinator populations. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation requires Member States to reverse pollinator decline by 2030. In 2025, the Commission adopted a standardized monitoring methodology, with the first assessment period beginning in December 2026. This creates a regulatory reason to measure pollinator abundance rather than relying mainly on local studies. (Environment)

• The market may eventually move beyond its current focus on managed honeybees. Both FAO and the new EU monitoring framework emphasize that pollination depends on a much wider population of wild insects. The EU framework explicitly measures diversity alongside abundance. The current startup landscape is still heavily centered on honeybee colonies because they are easier to manage commercially, but the monitoring opportunity is likely to become broader. (FAOHome)

How does the funding environment look?

• Beewise is the clear funding outlier. It raised an $80 million Series C in 2022 and another $50 million Series D in 2025. That scale of financing makes more sense when viewed as a robotics company rather than simply a beekeeping startup. BeeHome requires physical manufacturing and deployment, so expanding the installed base consumes much more capital than selling monitoring software.

• BeeHero shows that investors are also willing to fund pollination as an agricultural infrastructure service. Its $42 million Series B in 2022 included General Mills alongside financial investors. The strategic participation is interesting because the value of better pollination ultimately flows into food production, giving companies further down the agricultural supply chain a reason to care about the technology.

• Outside these two companies, funding remains much smaller. Ubees raised €8 million in 2026 after an earlier $8 million growth investment, while Dalan raised $3 million in late 2025. Vatorex has relied partly on European grants alongside smaller private financing. There is clearly investor interest in bee health, but it has not produced a broad wave of large venture rounds.

• The financing model seems to depend heavily on what is being built. Robotics platforms can justify large venture rounds when investors believe they can replace a meaningful part of commercial beekeeping. More specialized interventions tend to attract smaller rounds or public support because their market is narrower. This makes the category look less like one venture market and more like several different businesses built around the same biological problem.

Terrestrial Wildlife

What is this category about?

• This category covers technologies that reduce harmful encounters between wild animals and human activity. The problem often appears where infrastructure cuts through animal habitat or where wildlife moves into farmland. The objective is not to remove the animals permanently. It is to prevent them from entering a dangerous place at the wrong moment.

• Traditional deterrence is difficult to operate continuously. A farm worker can scare animals away from a field, while railway staff can react after animals are spotted near the tracks. Neither approach scales well across large areas. Automated systems try to detect the animal early enough that intervention can happen without someone watching the site.

• Permanent deterrents also lose effectiveness because animals can get used to them. A sound that plays continuously may eventually become part of the environment. This creates a need for systems that react only when an animal is actually present and can adapt the response to what has been detected.

• The economic problem is usually larger than the wildlife incident itself. An animal on a railway can cause delays or a collision. Wildlife entering farmland can destroy crops, while predators around livestock create another source of loss. This means wildlife protection technology often gets purchased through an operational budget rather than a conservation budget.

What do products in this category do?

• The main product model is an autonomous detection and deterrence unit placed directly in the field. The logic is to intervene only when a real animal is present, rather than running a deterrent continuously. Flox Edge uses onboard AI to identify wildlife and then triggers species specific sounds intended to move the animal away. HabitatSense is developing a similar edge-AI approach for animals such as badgers and foxes.

• A second approach integrates wildlife detection into the infrastructure where the danger occurs. This matters when simply moving an animal away is not enough and the system also needs to interact with an operator. Innovation Factory has developed railway systems that detect animals beside the track and trigger deterrence before a train arrives. Flox is working with Alstom on an onboard system that detects wildlife ahead of a train and then adds sound deterrence.

• Some products turn camera networks into a remote wildlife management system. The product logic is that the same hardware used for deterrence can also show operators what is happening across many locations. Innovation Factory packages DeterCam with remote monitoring and alerts. Flox combines its field devices with a software platform that records detections and deterrence events. This gives operators evidence of whether the intervention is actually working.

What types of customers are using these products?

• Transport operators are the strongest customer group in the category. Innovation Factory worked with LNER and the East Coast Partnership on a deer deterrence pilot south of Grantham. The deployment covered a one-mile section of railway and recorded more than 10,000 deterrence events. Flox has worked with Alstom on railway wildlife safety and with BDX Rail on deployments around high risk transport sites.

• Airports buy the technology because wildlife close to runways creates a direct safety risk. Flox has worked with Swedavia across Kiruna, Malmö and Umeå airports. Mora Airport later deployed its adaptive bioacoustic system for operational bird control. The customer logic is similar to rail: detect animals before they become an incident rather than reacting after one occurs.

• Conservation organisations can become customers when the objective is coexistence rather than infrastructure protection. Flox has deployed systems with WWF in Sweden to detect wolves and deter them before livestock attacks. It has also partnered with Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Colorado. In these cases, technology is being used as an alternative to lethal wildlife management.

• Agriculture is another potential market, but commercial proof is still thinner. Flox participated in an Agro Sörmland project across winter wheat fields to reduce wildlife damage. HabitatSense targets farmers with its wildlife deterrence product, although its named first customer is currently using the company's separate water monitoring system. I would therefore still consider agricultural wildlife deterrence an emerging customer segment rather than a proven one in this landscape.

What are the major trends shaping this category?

• Some wildlife conflicts are increasing because conservation has actually worked. Europe now has around 23,000 wolves, with the population estimated to have increased 35% between 2016 and 2023. Their geographical range has also expanded substantially. The return of large carnivores is a conservation success, but it puts animals back into landscapes where livestock farming and other human activity continued during their absence. This creates more demand for technologies built around coexistence rather than simply species protection.

• Transport operators are starting to treat wildlife as a measurable infrastructure problem. UIC made animals on railway tracks the focus of its 2025 railway safety study and recorded 6,063 deer encounters in the underlying dataset. Wildlife related events per train kilometre declined between 2021 and 2024, which UIC says may reflect the impact of mitigation measures. Better measurement makes it easier for technologies in this category to prove that they actually reduce incidents.

• Terrestrial animal collisions can be particularly expensive even when they occur less frequently. The FAA recorded 6,713 terrestrial mammal strikes with aircraft between 1990 and 2025. About 21% caused aircraft damage, compared with 6% for bird strikes. Deer were responsible for 86% of damaging terrestrial mammal strikes. This creates a strong economic argument for preventing a relatively small number of high cost events.

• Wildlife management is becoming more targeted because the underlying conflict is highly local. European Commission research on large carnivores shows that livestock attacks do not rise mechanically with the number of wolves in an area. Protection measures can reduce incidents after animals first return to a region. That favours systems that understand when an animal is actually creating risk and intervene at that moment, rather than relying on permanent barriers or indiscriminate deterrence.

How does the funding environment look?

• Flox is the only company in the category that currently looks like a conventional venture-backed startup. It raised a seed round in February 2026 and followed it with a $1 million GENIUS NY award in May. The financing coincides with its move into North America and a broader hiring push, suggesting investors are backing the idea that wildlife management can become a scalable infrastructure technology rather than a collection of local conservation projects.

• Innovation Factory has followed a much more grant-driven path. Innovate UK provided £49,230 for the deer deterrence project in 2025. An earlier £376,819 grant funded a different sensing project, so I would not treat all of its public financing as funding for wildlife technology. The company nevertheless shows that public innovation funding can finance the expensive field validation required before transport operators adopt these systems.

• The category is still extremely early from a funding perspective. HabitatSense has no disclosed external financing, while Innovation Factory remains a very small company despite years of product development. Flox therefore represents most of the visible venture momentum. There is real customer demand for the problem, but investors have not yet shown that they see terrestrial wildlife management as a large standalone venture category.

• The strongest funding case appears to be where conservation overlaps with infrastructure economics. Preventing an animal collision can avoid a direct operational cost for a railway or airport. That gives a startup a clearer ROI story than wildlife protection alone. The companies that can tie animal protection to an existing safety or maintenance budget are therefore likely to have an easier path to venture-scale financing.