University of Murcia spinoff Bleecker uses camera-read tags to track goods in warehouses

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In 2018 a Murcia agrifood company went to a University of Murcia computer vision group with a familiar complaint. Its RFID tags kept misreading pallets, especially near metal or liquids, and barcodes meant scanning every package by hand. Three professors, Félix J. García Clemente, Pedro Enrique López de Teruel and Alberto Ruiz, designed a new kind of geometric label that ordinary video cameras can read from a distance while the goods are moving. They patented it. Most academics stop there and license the patent. These three set up Bleecker Technologies at the end of 2019 to sell it themselves.

Covid arrived a few months later. The founders spent 2020 and 2021 running pilots and getting the system to work around the clock, then launched commercially in 2022. Bleecker now runs in more than 30 logistics centres in Spain for operators including GXO, DHL, ID Logistics, Airpharm and Garvasa, serving clients such as Carrefour, MediaMarkt and Ybarra, as well as PcComponentes. The company says it cuts truck loading and unloading times by more than 20% and has brought rejections caused by shipping errors to zero. Its largest sites run more than 120 cameras at once. Often, García Clemente said, it is the retailer that asks the logistics operator to install the system, and the operator then rolls it out to its other clients.

Bleecker won the national round of the Glovo Startup Campus in Madrid and took third prize at the international final in Barcelona. It is preparing to expand to the United States and France.