PerPlant raises €1M to install AI cameras on tractors, with 200,000 hectares in the bank
Copenhagen agtech has already mapped nine times more European farmland than all Danish agricultural drones combined. Two prominent Nordic investors are looking to the United States next.
The capital sits alongside consistent funding from Denmark’s EIFO, the European Space Agency, and Innovation Fund Denmark.
The headline of this technology, as PerPlant says, is a ninety percent reduction in herbicide use for the average Danish farmer with 200 hectares of land. Fertilizer use dropped by thirty percent.
The group of investors, in terms of distribution during the cycle, puts the savings at about DKK 269,000 per year per farm, which is enough to pay back the system in one growing season.
What’s hard to argue with is the dataset. PerPlant says its cameras already cover more than 200,000 hectares of European farmland, a feat it describes as nine times the combined coverage of all agricultural aircraft in Denmark and the largest precision farming dataset in the Nordics.
Where a satellite image usually has a resolution of ten to thirty meters, the sensors on the PerPlant tractor have a resolution of two to ten centimeters. That’s sharp enough, the company says, to serve as audit-level documents, the kind that banks, insurance companies and EU authorities can use to verify what’s being sprayed, where, and why.
Documents are an important part of commerce. European farmers are under regulatory pressure to reduce chemical use and prove that they have done so.
The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy set a goal of halving pesticide use by 2030, and funding mechanisms are increasingly tied to visible environmental performance.
Precision sprinkler companies have studied the same room. Earlier this year, Dutch startup BBLeap raised 5 million euros for a reversible nozzle level system that takes a different technological route to the same result. The two are not direct competitors in terms of scale, but they are targeting the same problem.
PerPlant was founded in 2022 by CEO Rasmus Emil Hansen and Chief Technology Officer Sumod Nandanwar, who met through Antler’s Nordic business plan.
The underlying technology was first developed at KTH in Stockholm, drawing on research into edge processing and sensor systems that allow real-time inference without sending data to the cloud.
The company now has fifteen employees and operates commercial exports to twelve countries, including Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Spain, Ireland and Chile.
Its current sponsors are Antler and The Footprint Firm; this round adds Rosenmaj and Østergaard Nielsen as direct investors.
The next stop, according to the company, is the United States. Hansen, in a statement, framed PerPlant’s offer in narrow terms: “When our AI drives over a field, it records the diversity of the field, each plant and the groundwater sensitive areas. This removes bureaucracy from the farmer and ensures that we can turn off the sprinkler in the groundwater sensitive areas with centimeter accuracy.”
That’s a more modest tone than the company’s usual sustainability framework, and perhaps more useful in the face of a North American farmer who has heard the EU policy debate before.
The technology, if the company’s numbers are stuck in this sector, will be sold with papers that end as there are chemicals it does not want.
