Bluegrove and the EIC Accelerator: Watching Salmon Welfare

Salmon farming is one of Norway's largest industries, and fish welfare in sea cages is one of its hardest problems. The company the EIC funded as Bluegrove, registered in Oslo in 2013 and now trading as CageEye, monitors salmon from below and inside the cage: echosounders track where and how the fish swim, cameras watch them feed, and software turns both into signals about appetite and stress.

The European Innovation Council granted €2,497,240.59 towards a €3.57 million project to build a fish welfare system, "Bluegrove Welfare Shield", on top of that monitoring. It was validated on 60 cages at 13 Norwegian farms. The company has a real business, with NOK 31.9 million of revenue in 2024, and a real loss, NOK 16.0 million the same year.

Where the Company Stands Today

The Norwegian company register lists CageEye AS, the same organisation number as the EIC's coordinator, with 26 employees. Its 2024 accounts show revenue of NOK 31.9 million, a net loss of NOK 16.0 million and equity of NOK 14.8 million. The Bluegrove web address now leads to CageEye's site. In February 2026 the company appointed Ragnhild Dragøy, from the krill company Aker QRILL, as chief executive, to accelerate "our growth ambitions". It also announced a precision feeding collaboration with the control systems company Piscada.

The Technology: Listening to the Fish

An echosounder under a sea cage maps the density and position of thousands of salmon; a camera sees whether feed pellets are eaten or sink uneaten. Together they show how hungry and active the fish are, which changes quickly when they are stressed or sick. The CORDIS report describes deep learning pellet detection, models of how fish respond to feeding, a fully digital sensor, and welfare scores built from appetite and behaviour and linked to the established FISHWELL and LAKSVEL welfare frameworks, trained on 25,000 feeding days.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from July 2022 to December 2024 and aimed at "a critical, unresolved challenge in aquaculture: fish welfare". According to CORDIS, the system was validated at 13 sites and 60 production cages in Norway; it detects stress, unusual activity and abnormal migration in the cage, and is meant to help farmers act earlier, reduce mortality, feed better and benchmark sites. The report gives no customer or sales numbers.

1. Welfare monitoring systemDeliveredBehaviour classifiers and welfare scores, per CORDIS.
2. Validation at farm scaleDelivered13 sites, 60 cages, 25,000 feeding days.
3. Lower fish mortalityNot shownNo published mortality results.
4. Profitable businessNot yetLoss of NOK 16.0M in 2024.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The Money

The company's 2024 loss equalled half its revenue, and its equity at the end of 2024, NOK 14.8 million, was smaller than that year's loss. We found no announced funding round. The EIC award was "grant first", under which any EIC equity is decided later, and we found no EIC Fund investment.

Why Europe Should Care

Monitoring that tells farmers early when fish are suffering could reduce losses and improve welfare, and the EIC funded a Norwegian company, from an EEA country associated to Horizon Europe, to build it.

The Verdict

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