Copenhagen agtech has already mapped nine times more European farmland than any Danish agricultural drone. Two prominent Nordic investors want the US next.
The capital sits alongside non-refining funding from Denmark’s EIFO, the European Space Agency and the Danish Innovation Fund.
According to PerPlant, the headline figure for the technology is a ninety percent reduction in herbicide use for the average Danish farmer with around 200 hectares. Fertilizer use is reduced by thirty percent.
The investment group saves approximately DKK 269,000 per farm per year in materials propagated by circulation, which is enough to pay back the system in one growing season.
It’s the data set that’s harder to argue with. PerPlant says its cameras have already covered more than 200,000 hectares of European farmland, nine times the total coverage of every agricultural drone in Denmark and what it describes as the largest precision farming data set in the Nordics.
Where satellite imagery typically resolves to ten to thirty meters, PerPlant’s tractor-mounted sensors resolve to two to ten centimeters. The company claims it’s sharp enough to act as audit-grade documents that banks, insurers and EU authorities can use to check what, where and on what is being sprayed.
Documentation is a commercially important part. European farmers are under regulatory pressure to reduce chemical use and prove they are doing so.
The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy aims to halve pesticide use by 2030, and subsidy regimes are increasingly linked to demonstrable environmental performance.
Sensitive spraying companies read the same room. Dutch startup earlier this year BBLeap raised €5 million for a retrofittable nozzle-level system that took a different technical route to the same result. The two are not yet direct competitors in scale, but they target the same problem.
PerPlant was founded in 2022 by CEO Rasmus Emil Hansen and CTO Sumod Nandanwar, who met through Antler’s Nordic entrepreneurship program.
The underlying technology was originally developed at KTH in Stockholm, based on research into edge processing and sensor systems that allow real-time inference without sending data to the cloud.
The company currently has fifteen employees and commercial activities in twelve countries, including Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Spain, Ireland and Chile.
Its current backers are Antler and The Footprint Firm; this round adds Rosenmaj and Østergaard Nielsen as direct investors.
According to the company, the next stop is the United States. Hansen, in a statement, interpreted PerPlant’s proposal in narrow bureaucratic terms: “As our AI moves across the field, it documents field changes, each plant, and groundwater-sensitive areas. This eliminates bureaucracy for the farmer and ensures that we close the sprinkler exactly with centimeter accuracy in groundwater-sensitive areas.”
This is a more modest step than the company’s usual sustainability framework, and probably more useful to a North American farmer who has heard the EU policy argument before.
The technology, if the company’s numbers hold up in the field, will sell as much for the paperwork it eliminates as for the chemicals it doesn’t spray.
