Ascend Took EIC Accelerator Money for Bird Radar, Then Chose Sound

The EU project summary for Ascend's grant estimated that aircraft and birds would collide about 20,000 times in Europe in 2019. Ascend ApS, a Copenhagen software company that trades as AscendXYZ, proposed to tackle them from the airline side. Its plan, AARN (Ascend Avian Radar Network), was to link bird radars at airports into one network and feed bird activity forecasts to airlines and pilots, not only to the airport staff who usually chase the birds away.

The European Commission selected AARN in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 5 June 2019, part of the Horizon 2020 pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Ascend ApS as the only company in the project. The grant was €1,219,421.88 towards a total cost of €1,742,031.25, and the project ran from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, according to CORDIS.

Seven years after the award, Ascend is still trading, but the airline radar network is gone from its website. The company now sells a cloud app for airport ground inspections and a family of acoustic bird detectors and deterrents, and advises that for most airports "no radar [is] required".

What Ascend Sells Now

The company's register entry is active, with Peter Hemmingsen as chief executive and Nikolaj Vestergaard Hansen as board chair, according to danskcvrapi and ownr, which lists Hemmingsen among the ultimate owners. Its former chair Henrik V. Hansen left the board in August 2023, according to North Data.

The website now leads with two product lines. Digital Airside is a cloud platform with iOS and Android apps for runway inspections, light checks, wildlife registrations and maintenance, which the company says supports data capture "at 30+ airports worldwide". Ascend OrnisSense is a set of four acoustic products, from a vehicle-mounted deterrent to listening devices in the approach and departure corridors, that identify birds by their calls and play deterrent sounds. The site says OrnisSense is "powered by BirdAlert", a field bird scarer made by the Danish company WildDetect, which had 110 systems running in Denmark, about 80% of them on farms, in 2018, according to Landbrugsavisen.

Radar now appears on the website mainly as something to compare against. A new service, OrnisSense Assess, is pitched as "the step before avian radar": acoustic monitoring to decide whether an airport needs radar at all, with the company saying that "for many airports the honest conclusion is that bioacoustic monitoring and deterrence covers the risk". The airline application, pilot briefings and connected radar network that the EU funded are not offered on the site. That is why this article classes Ascend as pivoted: the company is the same, but its lead products are not the funded technology.

The Technology: From Radar Forecasts to Listening Devices

Bird strikes are concentrated close to the ground. Hemmingsen told the CORDIS Results in Brief that 92% of strikes happen below 3,000 feet. EU rules make the airport, not the airline, responsible for the risk: aerodrome operators must assess the wildlife hazard on and around the aerodrome and set procedures to minimise collisions, under rule ADR.OPS.B.020 of Commission Regulation (EU) No 139/2014, as summarised in EASA's bird and wildlife control guide. Commercial tools are built for that buyer.

AARN set out to sell to the other side. Avian radars at airports would measure bird activity, and models combining radar history with weather and local bird counts would "accurately predict bird activity 24 hours ahead", Hemmingsen said in the CORDIS summary. Pilots could use the forecast in briefings, take off or land in the opposite direction, or climb more steeply through high-risk layers, and airline planners could factor it into schedules. The plan built on Ascend's earlier work with the European Space Agency, which since 2016 had funded tools to map wildlife hazards around airports from Sentinel satellite images, according to Ingeniøren and ESA.

The acoustic products Ascend sells today work differently. A radar sees any bird with enough radar cross-section, with its position and altitude, but not its species. A microphone hears only birds that call, at shorter range, but can name the species and trigger a deterrent. The company's own comparison table on its website sets out these trade-offs and concludes that the two are "complementary, not interchangeable".

The Aalborg Record Came Before the Grant

Ascend's strongest evidence comes from Aalborg Airport, and it predates the EIC award. In October 2018, ESA quoted the airport's quality manager, Thomas Hugo Møller, saying that by using data and new active measures "Aalborg Airport has reduced bird strikes by one half in one year", according to ESA Business Applications. The ESA page for the WAMMO demonstration project, whose final review was in June 2020, quotes the airport's safety manager, Bjørn Simonsen, saying that the strike rate fell from 16.8 per 10,000 movements in 2016 to 3.5 in 2019, according to ESA.

The sources describe the scale of the drop differently. ESA wrote in April 2019 that the system had "more than halved" annual strikes at Aalborg, and a 2022 article in Innovation News Network, quoting Hemmingsen, put the 2018 drop at 75%. The same article says Aalborg combined the radar with more staff in high-risk periods, remote-controlled gas cannons, structured hunts and staff training, so the result cannot be credited to the radar alone.

What AARN Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project objective was to turn the ESA prototypes into a "market-ready service" that would share radar bird measurements with airlines, pilots, air navigation service providers and airports, "creating for the first time in the industry a network of connected systems". It said that "some of the largest airlines and airports in the world" were taking part.

The final periodic report, covering 2021, says Ascend installed the planned radars, with photographs from Billund and Roskilde airports, kept them running and collected data. It says the cloud platform was upgraded for multiple sites, third-party radar integration was completed, and the pilot, airline operations and safety management applications were "finalized". An amendment added work on the opposite question: identifying low-risk periods in which airlines could fly faster on departure and save fuel. The company also said it had filed a patent on "artificial intelligence radar", which would estimate bird activity at airports without a physical radar. No Ascend patent was found in a search of Google Patents by applicant or by Hemmingsen as inventor; Espacenet could not be queried for this article, so the filing remains unverified.

In the CORDIS Results in Brief, Hemmingsen said the company was "in the process of signing up airline users". No airline has since been named as a customer by Ascend or by any third party found for this article.

1. Radars installed and operated in the networkDeliveredBillund and Roskilde, per the CORDIS report.
2. Pilot, airline and safety applicationsSelf-reported"Finalized" per CORDIS; not offered on the company website in 2026.
3. Airline users signedNot achievedNo airline customer named in any public source.
4. AI radar patentUnverifiedReported as pending in 2022; no publication found.
5. Market-ready radar network serviceNot on saleThe website now recommends acoustics first and radar only for the busiest airports.

The project ran on schedule, ending on 31 December 2021 as planned, and CORDIS shows no other EU project for Ascend. Ascend is not among the companies on the EIC Fund's list of investments, which was searched page by page for this article; the 2019 award was grant only. No private funding round or acquisition has been reported.

The Money

Ascend's annual reports, filed with the Danish Business Authority and summarised by estatistik.dk, show a company that shrank through and after its EIC project. It made a profit of DKK 55,014 in 2018, then lost money in every year from 2019 to 2024, DKK 7.86 million in total. Equity fell from DKK 9.58 million at the end of 2018 to DKK 1.72 million at the end of 2024. Much of that equity had been capitalised software development, booked at DKK 12.18 million in 2018 and DKK 1.44 million in 2024 as it was written down. Cash at the end of 2023 was DKK 33,520.

Gross profit, the only sales measure in the abbreviated accounts, peaked at DKK 6.05 million in 2021, the last year of the EIC project, and fell to DKK 2.18 million in 2023. It recovered to DKK 3.98 million in 2025, when Ascend made a net profit of DKK 1.23 million and equity rose to DKK 2.95 million.

The headcount went one way. The filings report an average of six employees in 2019 and 2020, five in 2021 and 2022, three in 2023 and 2024, and two in 2025, when the report also restated 2024 as two. The registers show three people at the company in 2026.

Why Europe Should Care

Wildlife strike reduction is a legal duty for every certified EU aerodrome under Regulation 139/2014, so tools that make it cheaper and more measurable have a ready market among Europe's smaller airports. Ascend's story also links two EU programmes: ESA's business applications support, which helped it build its first products on Copernicus Sentinel data, and the EIC, which paid for the radar network.

The record shows where the market pulled the company. ESA's 2025 account says Ascend gave up a "low-cost service with a wide customer base" for "a more tailored, high-value service" for airports within the EU, and that most users of its demonstration project became paying customers. That is a story of survival by narrowing focus. It is not the airline-wide network that the EIC grant was meant to bring to market.

The Verdict

Ascend has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.