PerPlant secures €1 million to equip tractors with AI cameras, covering 200,000 hectares.

      The Copenhagen agtech firm has already mapped nine times more European farmland than all Danish agricultural drones combined. Two prominent Nordic investors are now looking towards the United States.

      The premise behind PerPlant is easily understandable for farmers: a box mounted on the tractor roof, a camera monitoring the field, and AI determining which plants to spray and which to leave untouched. This week, the Copenhagen-based startup announced it has secured €1 million (DKK 7.6 million) in funding led by Jytte Rosenmaj, chair of the carbon-credit platform Agreena, and Kræn Østergaard Nielsen, the former CEO of Danish retailer Coop Danmark, who is now an active AI investor.

      The funding comes in addition to non-dilutive contributions from Denmark’s EIFO, the European Space Agency, and Innovation Fund Denmark.

      PerPlant claims that their technology can achieve a ninety percent reduction in herbicide usage for an average Danish farmer managing around 200 hectares. Fertilizer usage would also decrease by thirty percent. The group of investors suggests that this translates to savings of approximately DKK 269,000 annually for each farm, allowing for a return on investment within a single growing season.

      The dataset PerPlant has amassed is also noteworthy. The company reports that its cameras have already surveyed over 200,000 hectares of European farmland, which it says is nine times the total coverage of all agricultural drones in Denmark, making it the largest precision-farming dataset in the Nordic region.

      While satellite imagery typically operates at a resolution of ten to thirty meters, PerPlant’s on-tractor sensors achieve a resolution of two to ten centimeters. This level of detail, the company argues, qualifies as audit-grade documentation that banks, insurers, and EU authorities can use to verify what was applied, where it was applied, and how.

      This documentation aspect is commercially significant, as European farmers face regulatory pressure to reduce chemical usage and to demonstrate compliance. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy aims to halve pesticide use by 2030, and subsidy programs are increasingly linked to measurable environmental performance.

      Several precision-spraying firms have recognized this trend. Earlier in the year, Dutch startup BBLeap raised €5 million for a nozzle-level system that employs a different technical approach to achieve similar results. While they are not direct competitors at scale just yet, both are targeting the same issue.

      PerPlant was founded in 2022 by CEO Rasmus Emil Hansen and CTO Sumod Nandanwar, who connected through Antler’s Nordic entrepreneur program. The core technology was initially developed at KTH in Stockholm, building on research into edge processing and sensor systems that enable real-time inference without relying on cloud data.

      The company currently employs fifteen people and has commercial operations in twelve countries, including Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Spain, Ireland, and Chile. Its existing investors include Antler and The Footprint Firm, with this funding round bringing in Rosenmaj and Østergaard Nielsen as new investors.

      Looking ahead, the company aims to expand into the United States. Hansen described PerPlant’s offering in pragmatic terms: “When our AI traverses the field, it documents field variation, every individual plant, and areas sensitive to groundwater. This reduces bureaucracy for the farmer and ensures we can precisely disable the sprayer over sensitive groundwater regions.”

      This presentation is more subdued compared to the company’s usual focus on sustainability, but it may resonate better with North American farmers who are familiar with EU policy discussions. The technology's appeal, if the company's metrics prove effective in practice, will stem as much from the administrative savings as from the avoidance of chemicals.