We build AI tools
for conservation
Conservation organisations collect more data than they can use, and almost none of them have the engineers to change that. We build the tools that do the work, and we put them in the open for anyone to use.
Why we exist
Conservation technology keeps getting built twice. Budgets are thin, so the work goes to whoever will take it at that price, and the technical decisions get made with nobody in the room able to judge them. Two years on, the person who understood the system has moved to another job, the hosting bill has lapsed, and four seasons of data sit on a drive in an office while somebody starts the whole thing again.
We think that is a licensing and maintenance problem rather than a technology problem. So everything Ceder builds is released under the Apache 2.0 licence, and written to be picked up by someone who did not write it. What we release stays released. Nobody can withdraw it or start charging you for it later, including us.
We are named after the Clanwilliam cedar, which grows on about 250 square kilometres of these mountains and nowhere else on earth. It has not come back on its own. Where it is coming back, it is because people carried seedlings up by hand and climbed back years later to see which ones took. Slow work, done in the open, by people who planned to still be there.
Find the animals in your data
A season of camera traps comes back as more footage than anyone on your team will ever watch, most of it grass moving in the wind. We pull out the animals, and we tell you which leopard is which across every camera she walked past.
Listen to a whole reserve at once
Sound reaches where a camera cannot see. Through fog, after dark, across a valley, into bush too thick to walk. A recorder left out for a month comes back with several hundred hours of it, nearly all wind and insects and engine noise.
We tune the open acoustic models to your species and your background, so what you get back is a list of calls with times against them.
How you get it
Everything we build is open, ready to be used and adapted to your needs. If you have someone technical, take it and run it yourself. There is nothing to sign and nothing to pay.
If you do not, we do the engineering with you. You are not starting from zero: everything the organisations before you funded is already in there, built and working. What you pay for is the part that does not exist yet, built around your conditions, and it joins the library the same way.
Tell us what you are working on
And what is not working about it at the moment. We will tell you whether it is something we can help with, and what it would take. If the honest answer is that you should take the open tools and run them yourself, we will say that instead.
Get in touch