AirForestry Secures SEK 28M Pre-Commit to the Series A, Ramps Up Engineering Hires
AirForestry, the company developing the world’s first aerial tree harvesting technology, has secured SEK 28 million in pre-Series A convertible financing from existing investors. The funding accelerates the development of its automated forest machine platform and supports an expanded engineering recruitment drive.
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That’s a remarkable amount of work hours for a single machine, the Norcar 600 owned by Erkki Rinne is taken well care of, it even has the original Diesel engine.
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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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It is not possible to eliminate chain shot, but there are simple steps that can be taken to reduce the risk.
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Arwel takes great pride in the fact that the mill has no waste whatsoever, “the peelings are used for children’s playgrounds, gardens and for farm animals in barns in the winter and the sawdust has multiple uses in gardens and farms as well.
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Timber hauliers need to encourage young blood in, and also look after the hauliers we have, we need make the sector a safe and positive place to work.
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The financing follows AirForestry’s €10.3M seed round led by Northzone in 2024 and comes as the company enters a new phase under CEO Caroline Walerud, who assumed the role in late 2025. Northzone Partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson, who led the seed round and convertible, now serves as Chairman of the Board.
AirForestry is building a fundamentally new forest machine, utilizing aerial harvesting in an electric, automated system designed for precision tree harvesting (thinning) without heavy ground infrastructure. The system architecture is engineered for automation, repeatability, and scalability, introducing a new machine category into an industry where core equipment design has remained largely unchanged for decades.
“We are moving from a proven concept to advanced field validation,” says Caroline Walerud, Founder and CEO of AirForestry. “This pre-commit to the Series A from our existing investors validates both the technology and the market opportunity. Our focus now is accelerating the development and strengthening our organization with 12 new talents: field test technicians, assembly technicians, production test engineers, mechanical engineers, and a Talent & Growth Lead .”
Forestry is one of the world’s most established resource industries. AirForestry’s system-level redesign introduces automation and scalability into a sector ripe for technological transformation.
Our Cofounder Olle Gelin…
…grew up in the forest. He is the sixth generation managing the solar-powered farm with its adjoining forest just outside Uppsala.
For Olle, sustainable forestry and a fossil-free forest industry have long been both a passion and a goal. Therefore, it is not surprising that his career has included product development of hybrid trucks at Scania, followed by eight years at Skogforsk, where he, among other things, initiated and led one of the world’s largest projects in forest automation, AUTO2.
Our co-founder, Dr. Mauritz Andersson, is a physicist and electric aviation enthusiast with twelve years of research in quantum optics and eleven years of industrial development of optical systems behind him. For Mauritz, the drive to find sustainable solutions to the climate crisis through innovative technology has always been his biggest motivation. Contrary to popular belief, Mauritz argued that aviation could actually be the most energy-efficient form of transportation—if powered by electricity.
The moment Olle and Mauritz met for the first time, it was obvious to both of them that forestry was ready for a completely new kind of innovation—a flying, fossil-free one. Rather than trying to make the existing forestry machines just a bit better, which Olle had already tried, they decided to seize the opportunity to take forestry to new heights—quite literally, up into the air.
They quickly secured sponsorship from three of Europe’s largest forest owners, built the first versions of the drone, and registered AirForestry AB in the spring of 2020.
Since then, development has been fast
In the summer of 2020, they met Caroline Walerud. She’s a biologist turned serial entrepreneur and deep tech investor focused on sustainability. Caroline, along with her family firm Walerud Ventures—known for investments in companies like Klarna, Midsummer, and Paebbl—joined as a founding investor.
Caroline joined the team as a chair of the board in addition to being a co-founder, and she now works full-time at the company.
AirForestry has signed agreements with some of the largest forest owners in Europe and continues to develop the technology on Danmarksgatan in Uppsala.
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Written by loggers for loggers and dedicated solely to the equipment used in forestry operations.