Armenia Startup Academy graduates: ForestBerg

American University of Armenia held a demo day for the second batch of Armenia Startup Academy accelerator on May 30, which included 12 startups.

Itel.am tells about the second batch of Armenia Startup Academy graduates in these series.

ForestBerg is a smart forest monitoring system, which allows protecting forests from wildfires, illegal logging and hunting.

The founders of the startup are Mariam Stepanyan and Albert Amirbekyan.

In an interview to Itel.am they said that the idea of creating this project was born during a joint hiking tour, when they discovered a number of illegal loggings. The startups targets governments, private forests and environmental NGOs.

“We place our censors on every next but one hectare. The censors record surrounding sounds and send the data to machine learning-based server, which alarms state structures and provides coordinates of given location in case of detecting sounds of logging or hunting,” the startup representatives explained.

According to the founders, current market doesn’t yet offer any product like ForestBerg.

“Nonetheless, our indirect competitors are companies, which analyze pictures via drones and satellites. Unlike them, our system operates and provides constant surveillance regardless of weather conditions.”

Touching upon the experience from Armenia Startup Academy, ForestBerg noted that the advice that they received will help them avoid additional issues, which startups usually have to face.

The 4-member team plans to attract new employees soon. The system is set to be placed in Armenian forests within a year, and then the team intends to enter new markets.

Armenia Startup Academy is initiated by Catalyst Foundation and implemented in the framework of the EU4Business Support to SME Development (SMEDA) Project, which is co-funded by the European Union and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by GIZ’s Private Sector Development in South Caucasus Programme. SMEDA is part of the EU4Business and EU4Innovation initiatives of the European Union.

Narine Daneghyan