Pro-Drone Since the EIC Accelerator: Blade Drones Sold to Swire

Wind turbine blades are still inspected mostly by technicians hanging from ropes, a job the European Commission's project summary puts at five hours and €1,500 per turbine. Pro-Drone, a start-up from the Lisbon area, wanted to replace them with a drone that flies itself around a turbine and photographs all three blades in one go. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 3 April 2019 it was selected for that project, Windrone Zenith, and the EU agreed to pay €1,339,396.80 of its €1,956,416.25 cost, according to CORDIS.

By the time the project ended in August 2021 the company had renamed itself BladeInsight, after its cloud reporting platform, and Swire Energy Services, the offshore services arm of the Swire group, had bought a majority of its shares, according to EIT InnoEnergy, one of its early backers, and Wind Systems. The legal entity still exists, now as Swire Renewable Energy (Portugal), S.A. The drone the EU paid for is harder to find.

What the Company Is Today

The Portuguese register shows one continuous company: incorporated on 23 February 2015 as Pro-Drone, Lda, later Pro-Drone, S.A., then BladeInsight, S.A., and now Swire Renewable Energy (Portugal), S.A., with share capital of €96,330 and its seat at Taguspark in Porto Salvo, according to Racius and eInforma. Both list the earlier names. The register records capital increases in April and August 2021 and March 2022, and several board changes in 2023 and 2024; eInforma holds balance sheets for 2022, 2023 and 2025, with its latest accounts update dated 16 July 2026. No insolvency is recorded. The date of the last name change and the company's revenue and headcount sit behind paid reports and could not be verified for this article.

The parent describes itself today as a wind services contractor with "600+" staff in "25+" countries, and lists an office at Taguspark, Porto Salvo, among its European locations, according to Swire Renewable Energy. Its blade services page lists "UAV Inspections" next to rope access inspections, and a 2023 job for Shell's NoordzeeWind farm, 36 Vestas V90 turbines, that included "autonomous drone inspection of repairs for quality assurance". Neither page names BladeInsight, Pro-Drone or Windrone Zenith, and the company's history page does not list the 2021 deal. The old domain www.pro-drone.eu, given in the EC winner list, now hosts an unrelated French drone service. Whether the autonomous drones in Swire's service offer are the ones developed in the EU project could not be verified.

The Swire Deal

EIT InnoEnergy announced on 14 June 2021 that BladeInsight had secured a strategic investment from Swire Energy Services "resulting in a majority shareholding". The terms were not disclosed. Wind Systems, reporting the deal on 15 July 2021, added that Swire got options for further investment and that it was the first stake Swire Energy Services had taken in "a technology company exclusively servicing the renewable energy industry". At the time the company said its technology had been used in 20,000 inspections with more than 4,000 hours of autonomous flight and 15 GW of wind capacity inspected, figures that come from the company and were not independently confirmed.

Ownership above the Portuguese company has since moved. Swire Renewable Energy says it became a standalone business, separate from Swire Energy Services, in 2022 and that it is "part of the Swire Group", according to its about page; it has since bought Altitec Blade Services, Obelisk Energy Services and Rope Access Sweden. Swire Energy Services itself was acquired by the investment firm Davidson Kempner in November 2025 and renamed SES Energy, according to Offshore Energies UK. The Portuguese company's name and its place on Swire Renewable Energy's office list point to it sitting in that business, but its current shareholder register was not available to confirm it.

The Technology: Three Blades, One Flight

Pro-Drone already sold blade inspections with a drone that photographed one blade at a time. The CORDIS objective describes the established alternatives: rope access, which is slow and hazardous, ground cameras, whose image quality "leaves many blade flaws undetected", and manually flown drones that need specialists for both flying and image analysis. Windrone Zenith was meant to fly autonomously around any turbine model, avoid collisions, photograph all three blades in a single flight and feed the images to machine learning models that flag damage automatically. The company claimed this would cut direct inspection costs by more than 50%, reduce turbine downtime six-fold and save €2,800 a year per onshore and €8,850 per offshore turbine, according to its periodic report. These are the company's projections, not measured results.

The reporting describes the method in detail. A 3D LiDAR on the drone scans the turbine into a point cloud, path-planning software works out a route that covers 100% of each blade, and the payload rides on a DJI M300 RTK drone. The team built a simulation framework and reached a 95% success rate surveying turbines in simulation, according to the same report.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2021; the grant agreement was signed on 10 September 2019. It was Pro-Drone's second Horizon 2020 award: a 2017 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant of €50,000, for a four-month feasibility study called Wind-Drone, is listed on CORDIS under the same company. The European Commission's list of April 2019 winners names PRO DRONE of Lisbon as the only beneficiary of Windrone Zenith.

The final periodic report, covering September 2020 to August 2021, is candid. The first work package, automatic damage detection, produced a tool that was deployed on the BladeInsight platform in September 2021 and recognised leading edge erosion and cracks; the company said accuracy was "already over 50%" and that a commercial release was expected in late 2021. On the drone itself, the report says the team was still "closing the final details of the first prototype" and planned to test it on a real turbine in the second half of October 2021, after the project had ended. The only field test reported during the project was a one-day proof of concept on a single turbine at the Vergão 2 wind farm on 17 June 2020, with the operator Generg.

A CORDIS results summary published on 14 January 2022 goes further, saying the team "developed a drone solution capable of inspecting all three blades on both onshore and offshore turbines in a single operation". The two CORDIS texts do not agree on how finished the drone was, and no launch of a three-blade product, under the Zenith name or any other, has been announced by the company or reported by a third party.

1. Automated blade damage detectionDeliveredDeployed on the BladeInsight platform, September 2021, per the CORDIS report.
2. Autonomous three-blade drone prototypePartlyUnfinished at project end per the report; described as developed in the January 2022 summary.
3. Bring Zenith to marketNot shownNo product launch or customer for a three-blade system announced.
4. Predictive maintenance and asset managementUnverifiedPlanned as next step in 2022; no public product found.
5. JobsReportedCompany says staff nearly tripled during the project; no register figures available.

The Money

The company disclosed little about its finances. In April 2019, the month of the EIC cut-off, it told SAPO, which covered a €5,000 entrepreneurship prize it had just won, that it had raised €800,000 in investment rounds, was flying six drones and counted Brazil as its largest market, with clients also in Belgium, France and Switzerland. EIT InnoEnergy says it supported the company from 2014. Against that, the two EU grants added up to €1,389,396.80. What Swire paid for its majority is not public.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's 2023 Wind Power Action Plan says the EU target of 42.5% renewable energy by 2030 needs "a massive increase in wind installed capacity". The EU added a record 16.3 GW of wind power in 2022, well below the 37 GW a year the target requires, according to the Commission's Blue Economy Observatory. Every one of those turbines needs its blades inspected for decades. Cheaper, safer inspection lowers operating costs for European wind farms, and Pro-Drone's case shows a typical route for such tools: the know-how stayed in Portugal, but inside a services group rather than as an independent product company.

The Verdict

Swire Renewable Energy and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.