AirForestry

Drone-based harvesting: a heavy-lift drone carries a light cutting tool that fells, prunes and lifts single trees to the road, with no ground disturbance.

Harvesting & machineryUppsala, Sweden

AirForestry develops a drone-based harvesting system that uses a lightweight 60 kg tool carried by a heavy-lift drone to selectively fell, prune, and transport individual trees to the nearest road. The approach enables fossil-free selective harvesting in sensitive terrain without ground disturbance. Investors include Northzone, Sveaskog, and SEB Greentech VC.

What Boreal Tech Brief reported

  1. #0472 Jun 2026 · Funding

    Holmen, SCA, Stora Enso and Sveaskog commit SEK 20M to AirForestry's drone-thinning pilots

    The Swedish AirForestry Pilot Project (SAPP) deploys autonomous electric thinning drones in live operations at each of the four forest owners, with the system locating, pruning, felling and transporting individual trees from the air. The funding is contracted pilot revenue rather than grant money, marking the company's first customer-paid field deployment alongside its existing Vinnova-funded PADA consortium (BTB #043). The announcement landed the day after AirForestry felled its first tree by drone in a real forest outside the test site (BTB #046), pairing the technical milestone with a commercial one.

  2. #04626 May 2026 · Launch

    AirForestry fells its first tree by drone in a live forest

    AirForestry flew into a real stand and took down a standing tree with a drone, the first time that has happened outside a test site. On its own, the system positioned itself, identified the tree, delimbed it, cut it, and set it down. Back on the test field it has now run the full sequence end to end without a hand on the controls. We covered the company's earlier harvest milestone in March; this is the step from proving the motion to doing it where the trees actually grow.

  3. #0435 May 2026 · Funding

    AirForestry Coordinates SEK 48M Vinnova PADA Consortium Spanning Forestry Majors, Tele2 and IKEA

    AirForestry moves from product validation to consortium lead, coordinating Vinnova's SEK 48M PADA program (Paradigm shift through data-driven, autonomous precision forestry) under the Advanced Digitalization track. Co-partners: Skogforsk, SLU, SCA Skog, Sveaskog, Stora Enso Skog, Holmen Skog, Tele2 and IKEA. The brief is to link the forestry value chain end-to-end and replace ground-based thinning machines with drones.

  4. #0343 Mar 2026 · Launch

    AirForestry Hits Full Harvest Milestone and Ramps Up Engineering Team

    AirForestry shared footage of their electric drone completing a full autonomous harvest cycle—flying to a tree, sawing it, lifting the trunk, and transporting it to the roadside without human input. Days later, the company announced open positions for drone technicians, hardware developers, and software engineers following the SEK 28M Series A pre-commitment.

  5. #02216 Dec 2025 · Hire

    New CEO at AirForestry as drone-thinning scale-up continues

    Swedish forest-tech company AirForestry, which has raised over SEK 100 million for its tree-harvesting drones, reshapes its leadership with a new CEO and Northzone's top executive stepping in as chair, signalling a push toward commercial scaling in Nordic forestry.