AirForestry’s Founders and Leadership Team: Olle Gelin, Founder and CEO, Gösta Forsén, CCO, Dr Mauritz Andersson, Founder and CTO, Caroline Walerud, Founder, Executive Chairman, and Walerud Ventures, Paul Carbonnier, COO, and Oskar Lund, CFO. Photograph: Ulf Berglund.
AirForestry, the world’s first company to develop aerial tree harvesting technology, has closed a €10.3M seed funding round led by Northzone, with participation from strategic, evergreen, and greentech investors Sveaskog, Kiko VC, CapitalT, Walerud Ventures, SEB Greentech VC, and Cloudbreak VC. AirForestry will use the funds to further develop their innovative technology that will bring forestry into a green, fossil free, more productive future. Source: Timberbiz
This funding includes €1.7M in grant financing from the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten), positioning AirForestry to further develop its breakthrough technology: harvesting trees from above with drones. By eliminating the need for heavy ground-based machinery, AirForestry minimizes terrain disruption and protects biodiversity while promoting healthier, more resilient forests through targeted thinning of weak or sick trees. Making the process fully electrical further brings the company closer to its vision of becoming the green global solution for forestry.
“We’re thrilled about our new investors who believe in the same goal as we do – making forest products more cost-effective and even more sustainable by unlocking all values of the forest. We now have a strong position to bring this solution to foresters, so that they can manage their forests effectively and increase productivity, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration,” CEO and Founder at AirForestry, Olle Gelin, said.
Traditional forestry consumes more than 3.5 billion litres of diesel annually. AirForestry’s fully electric technology offers a transformative alternative, with the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 10 megatons annually. Early testing shows that by thinning forests without logging trails and improving growth conditions, their solution can save approximately 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per hectare each year – equating to over 500 megatons globally.
“We have a fantastic configuration of investors to build the next chapters towards our vision. We’re excited to welcome Northzone’s General Partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson and Kiko VC’s Ben Murphy to the Board of Directors,” Caroline Walerud, Founder and Executive Chair said.
“Looking ahead, we hope to tackle larger portions of forestry, with an environmental upside that will result in many gigatons of saved CO2.”
The round is led by Northzone, a renowned global US$4 billion multi-stage venture capital fund, famous for investing in several ground-breaking companies, such as Spotify, Trustpilot, and iZettle.
“AirForestry represents a pivotal leap forward in sustainable and more cost-effective forest management with a solution that drives both environmental impact and technological progress. It is hard to imagine a team better equipped to disrupt this particular industry. Olle Gelin is one of the most knowledgeable and connected forest experts in the world and Mauritz Andersson leads a team of world class experts in autonomous systems and drone technology,” Partner at Northzone, Pär-Jörgen Pärson said.
Additional investors include Kiko VC, an evergreen deeptech climate fund, alongside SEB Greentech VC, an evergreen climate investor, Cloudbreak VC, a European family office founded on electric drive units, and founding investors Walerud Ventures, a family office building deeptech for the living planet – not to mention Sveaskog, one of the world’s largest forest owners and the largest forest owner in Europe.
“With our investment in AirForestry, we want to contribute to the future of forestry. Together with AirForestry, we can develop products and solutions for advance technology and machinery to meet the complex challenges facing the forestry sector. Creating conditions for eventually being able thinning forests with drones is revolutionary for how we manage forests, while also reducing the risk of impact in the forest terrain from heavy machines,” Per Callenberg, Head of Sustainable Business Development at Sveaskog said.
Among the investors we also find CapitalT, the Dutch venture capitalist company focused on climate and future of work, with serial entrepreneur and founding partner Janneke Niessen at the helm.
“We believe in backing technologies that not only solve pressing environmental challenges but also create real, scalable impact. AirForestry’s electric drone solution is doing just that by reinventing forest management in a way that promotes forest health, reduces carbon emissions, and boosts productivity. Their team, with extensive experience in both the forestry and technological sectors, plays a key role in driving this innovation forward. We are thrilled to support their mission and see them play a crucial role in the future of sustainable forestry,” Janneke Niessen, founding partner at CapitalT said.
