AirForestry’s 20-Foot Drone Harvests Trees From Above Without Touching the Ground
Photo; AirForestry
AirForestry’s innovative electric drone has successfully completed an entire harvest cycle in an operational forest. This significant achievement marks a pivotal advancement in sustainable forestry practices, as the Swedish company emphasizes its potential to eliminate the need for heavy machinery. By doing so, the drone helps prevent the soil and delicate ecosystems of the forest floor from experiencing the detrimental impacts often associated with traditional logging equipment.
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Kieran Anders is a forestry contractor working in the lake district. His work involves hand cutting and extracting timber using a skidder and tractor-trailer forwarder.
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Forestry has looked roughly the same for decades: 15-ton diesel harvesters roll through the woods, carving access roads that consume about 20 percent of usable forest land and compacting soil in ways that damage root systems and release mercury runoff. AirForestry, a Uppsala-based startup founded in 2020, believes it can replace those machines with something lighter, quieter, and entirely airborne.
The company’s system centers on a six-rotor electric drone measuring 6.2 meters across, built from carbon fiber with angled rotors for precision flight. The drone carries a 60-kilogram harvesting tool, bringing the total airborne weight to around 265 kilograms. The system can lift approximately 200 kilograms, which is enough to extract thinning-stage trees from dense stands.
How It Works
The process unfolds in stages. Multiple drones operate simultaneously from an operator station, using AI and computer vision to identify trees that are overcrowded, lower-quality, or suppressing the growth of their neighbors. Once a target is selected, the drone positions itself above the tree and the harvesting tool grips the top. The tool then releases and descends the trunk under gravity, stripping branches as it goes. The branches fall to the forest floor where they decompose into natural fertilizer. After the trunk is cut near the ground, the tool re-grips the tree and the drone lifts it out to a roadside drop-off point before heading back for the next one.
Traditional thinning requires stickvägar, the Swedish term for access corridors cut through the forest to let ground machines reach their targets. AirForestry’s aerial approach eliminates this entirely. The company claims its method uses about half the energy per thinned tree compared to conventional techniques.
The Business Case
The environmental pitch is straightforward: traditional forestry consumes more than 3.5 billion liters of diesel annually. AirForestry says its fully electric technology could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 10 megatons per year if adopted at scale. By eliminating logging trails, the company estimates an additional 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per hectare could be sequestered annually.
These are ambitious projections, but the company has drawn serious institutional backing. In October 2024, AirForestry closed a €10.3 million seed round led by Northzone, the venture fund behind Spotify and iZettle. Investors included Sveaskog, one of Europe’s largest forest owners, along with climate-focused funds like Kiko VC and SEB Greentech VC. The round included €1.7 million in grant financing from the Swedish Energy Agency.
In early 2026, the company added SEK 28 million in pre-Series A convertible financing from existing investors, along with a €4.4 million grant from Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, to advance its autonomous systems.
Commercial Commitments
Sveaskog, Sweden’s state-owned forest company, signed a seven-year off-take agreement in 2023 committing to purchase drone thinning services on 1,000 hectares annually starting in 2028. The contract runs through 2035 and represents a concrete commercial commitment, not just a pilot.
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Written by loggers for loggers and dedicated solely to the equipment used in forestry operations.