The Rijen-based startup, which upgrades existing sprinklers with nozzle-by-nozzle PWM control, will use the capital to commercialize its LeapEye camera system and scale LeapBox internationally from Europe to Canada.
The idea behind BBLeap is devastatingly simple: most agricultural sprayers treat the entire field as a single unit, applying the same dose of pesticide, herbicide or fertilizer regardless of what the individual plants actually need.
BBLeap is built on the premise that it’s wasteful, imprecise and unnecessary, and that the technology to do something better has been around long enough that there’s no good excuse not to use it.
The Dutch startup, based in Rijen, North Brabant, has raised €5 million in a round led by Utrecht-based private equity firm ESquare Capital, with co-investment from Yield Lab Europe, an impact-focused agri-food venture capital fund, with support from the European Investment Fund.
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Existing shareholders, including BOM (Brabant Development Agency, one of the company’s early backers) and Beheermaatschappij Vriend, also participated. BBLeap will use the capital to complete the commercial launch of LeapEye, a broad-based camera detection system for agriculture, and to expand LeapBox internationally, adding Canada to its existing footprints in Europe and Australia.
BBLeap was founded in 2019 by Peter Millenaar, Rieks Kampman and Martijn van Alphen, three people with experience in agricultural machinery who previously worked together at a sprayer manufacturer. Acting CEO Millenaar described the company’s mission as “Farming at the Plant Level,” giving each individual plant exactly the dose it needs, rather than an average across a field.
The company’s flagship product, the LeapBox, is a modular pulse-width modulation (PWM) system that can be added to any existing sprayer, regardless of brand or age, independently controlling each nozzle to maintain constant pressure, consistent droplet size and precise volume.
LeapSpace, a cloud-based platform, manages high-resolution prescription maps generated from drone, satellite and sensor data.
A second product, LeapEye, extends the system’s capabilities to real-time detection: a wide-angle camera that scans the crop as the sprayer moves across the field, determines what needs to be processed and adjusts the output of individual nozzles accordingly.
According to the company, this allows for a chemical reduction of 20% to 99% and a capacity increase of up to 40%, depending on the application. These figures are from the company’s own materials and have not been independently verified.
It is the technology itself that has received independent approval: BBLeap recently received approval for its PWM spraying approach from Germany’s Julius Kühn Institute (JKI), the federal research center for plant protection, a meaningful regulatory approval in the European agricultural market.
The company says it already has more than 200 users running BBLeap systems in Europe and Australia, and the rollout is currently underway in Canada. Both user count and geographic claims come from press releases and have not been independently verified.
What has been independently documented is the breadth of the partnership: BBLeap has partnered with precision agriculture data platform OneSoil on a global integration that allows farmers to convert satellite prescription maps into BBLeap spray jobs in minutes, and has established relationships with sprayer manufacturers including Danish company Dammann.
“BBLeap is 100% guaranteed to spray exactly what you need, providing better applications, less disease and fewer weeds, using significantly less chemicals” Peter Millenaar said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The investment comes at a time when regulatory pressure on the use of agricultural chemicals in Europe is intensifying. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy aims to halve pesticide use by 2030, and precision spraying technologies are one of the cleaner ways farmers can move towards this goal without sacrificing productivity.
The challenge for BBLeap is to turn a technology that has proven itself in field trials and with early adopters into a commercially replicable product that can now be sold, installed and supported at the scale its investors are betting on.
