News & Updates

Milestones, product launches, and conservation impact from the WaterfowlAI team.

March 2026Milestone

Nearly 5,000 Hunts and 28,000+ Birds Logged on BlindBook

A milestone worth marking — hunters across multiple flyways have now logged nearly 5,000 hunts and over 28,000 birds through BlindBook, building one of the most comprehensive real-time waterfowl datasets ever assembled.

What started as a tool for a handful of hunting clubs has grown into a data engine spanning dozens of states and multiple flyways. Each hunt logged adds species observations, location data, weather conditions, and harvest counts to an ever-growing dataset that's already being used to inform conservation decisions.

This organic growth has been driven almost entirely by word-of-mouth within the hunting community. Hunters are logging because the tools are useful to them — not because they're asked to participate in a research program. That's the core insight behind WaterfowlAI: align incentives, and the data takes care of itself.

January 2026Funding

WaterfowlAI Selected for MTC IDEA Fund TechLaunch Award

WaterfowlAI has been selected by the Missouri Technology Corporation (MTC) as one of 10 startups in the January 2026 IDEA Fund investment cycle. The MTC Board of Directors approved a total of $5.8 million in awards across three programs — TechLaunch, Seed Capital, and Venture Capital — supporting high-growth technology companies based in Missouri.

WaterfowlAI was awarded through the TechLaunch program, MTC's pre-seed co-investment fund designed for early-stage startups raising between $500K and $1M. The IDEA Fund operates on a matching basis, requiring each dollar of MTC investment to be matched by private capital — reinforcing the strength of the company's investor interest alongside the state's commitment to technology-driven innovation.

The MTC recognized WaterfowlAI for building BlindBook, an AI-powered club management and ecological data platform that digitalizes waterfowl operations for hunters, outfitters, and conservation partners. WaterfowlAI was one of three companies selected for TechLaunch in this cycle, alongside startups in AI chip design and financial data science.

January 2026Product Launch

WingID AI Species Identification Launches

Our free, AI-powered species identification tool is now live. Snap a photo of a wing and WingID returns an instant species match — bringing hunters into the WaterfowlAI ecosystem while generating valuable training data for our computer vision models.

WingID is designed to be completely ungated. No account required, no paywall. Hunters upload a wing photo, and within seconds get a species identification powered by machine learning models trained on thousands of verified samples. It's the fastest, easiest way to ID a bird in the field.

Beyond the immediate utility for hunters, every identification feeds back into the model — improving accuracy with each use and building a species-level dataset that has never existed at this scale. WingID is both a free tool and a viral growth engine for the WaterfowlAI platform.