Indian Startup Strofes Expands AI-Enabled Wildlife Surveillance to New Cheetah Landscape

An Indian conservation-technology startup that helped build remote surveillance infrastructure for the country’s cheetah programme at Kuno National Park is expanding its footprint to another important wildlife landscape in Madhya Pradesh.

Strofes Technologies says it has received a work order to install long-range camera surveillance for cheetah monitoring at Virangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve, marking another deployment of Indian-built monitoring technology in a protected area being prepared for the future expansion of Project Cheetah.

The development is particularly significant because the reserve includes Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuary, which has long been identified as a potential cheetah reintroduction landscape.

In May 2026, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change said the next phase of Project Cheetah would include development of new sites such as Nauradehi in Madhya Pradesh as India works towards establishing a broader cheetah metapopulation across suitable landscapes.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority has also stated that Nauradehi is being readied for cheetah introduction. The landscape forms part of the much larger Virangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve and contains a mixture of dry deciduous forest, grasslands and other habitats capable of supporting large carnivores and their prey.

For Strofes, the new assignment builds upon several years of work developing surveillance technology specifically for India’s forests.

The Kerala-registered company was incorporated in July 2020 and is recognised on the Kerala Startup Mission platform as a climate-tech startup working with technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones and security and surveillance systems.

Its flagship wildlife-surveillance platform, DigiNetra, is designed for locations where conventional CCTV infrastructure can be difficult to operate. Instead of relying on fixed electricity and conventional communications networks, the system combines technologies such as long-range cameras, thermal imaging, solar-powered towers and wireless connectivity for continuous monitoring in remote forests.

Strofes also integrates artificial intelligence into its surveillance architecture. Its Mirage video-management platform can process feeds from multiple cameras and perform real-time detection of humans, vehicles and animal species, allowing potentially important events to be separated from hours of routine footage.

Experience From Kuno

The company’s most prominent wildlife deployment began even before the first African cheetahs arrived in India.

According to Strofes, the first four DigiNetra infrared pan-tilt-zoom cameras were installed at Kuno National Park in December 2021, around nine months before the first group of cheetahs arrived from Namibia in September 2022. The infrastructure could therefore be used as the reintroduction programme entered its operational phase.

The network was subsequently expanded.

Strofes says additional cameras were installed at Kuno and that a dedicated surveillance control room was commissioned in April 2025. The park’s DigiNetra network now comprises seven cameras, providing a centralised system for monitoring areas associated with India’s reintroduced cheetah population.

Such live surveillance serves a different role from conventional camera traps.

Camera traps are particularly useful for wildlife surveys because they can operate autonomously for long periods and record animals whenever sensors are triggered. Long-range PTZ and thermal-camera networks, however, can give forest personnel a continuing view of selected locations and allow operators to actively move cameras towards an animal, person or event.

For closely managed conservation programmes such as cheetah reintroduction, the two approaches can complement each other.

Technology Spreading Across Madhya Pradesh’s Protected Areas

Kuno is not Strofes’ only wildlife deployment.

The company says it installed four cameras at Madhav National Park in 2023 to monitor the boundary adjoining Shivpuri city. Madhav has subsequently been designated a tiger reserve.

At Pench Tiger Reserve, a long-range infrared surveillance system was installed in December 2023 to monitor illegal fishing around Totladoh Dam. Two more cameras were added in 2025, according to the company.

Strofes also reports installing cameras for cheetah monitoring at Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in 2024. Gandhi Sagar became the second major landscape in India’s expanding cheetah programme after Kuno.

The addition of Virangana Durgavati would therefore extend the company’s conservation-surveillance work across another landscape connected with India’s plans for establishing multiple cheetah populations.

Building Surveillance for Forests Without Power or Networks

One of the more difficult engineering problems in wildlife surveillance is not the camera itself but the infrastructure required to keep it operating.

Protected areas frequently contain locations with no grid electricity, weak cellular networks and difficult road access. Equipment may have to withstand extreme summer temperatures, monsoon rains, dust and long intervals between maintenance visits.

Strofes has consequently designed its wildlife systems around solar power, battery storage, wireless communications and remote operation. The company says its surveillance architecture combines AI, IoT, GIS and renewable-energy technologies specifically for such conditions.

This is where wildlife conservation is increasingly intersecting with India’s broader deep-tech ecosystem.

Modern protected-area management can involve camera traps, satellite collars, drones, acoustic sensors, artificial intelligence, GIS mapping and persistent long-range cameras. Each technology generates a different type of information, but together they can give forest officials a far more detailed picture of what is happening across large and difficult landscapes.

For Project Cheetah, that capability becomes especially relevant as the programme moves beyond a single protected area.

Kuno remains the primary population-establishment site, while Gandhi Sagar has been developed as an additional habitat. The government has indicated that further landscapes, including Nauradehi, will form part of the next stage as India attempts to develop a geographically distributed cheetah population rather than concentrating the animals at one location.

If the Virangana Durgavati deployment proceeds as described by Strofes, an Indian startup that began installing wildlife cameras before the first cheetahs reached Kuno will now be helping build the surveillance infrastructure for another landscape in the programme.

It is a small but revealing example of how AI, renewable energy, remote communications and indigenous field engineering are becoming increasingly important tools in Indian wildlife conservation.

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