AirForestry's EIC Accelerator Lifts Trees Out by Drone

Thinning a forest is the most valuable thing a forest owner can do, and the way it is done is absurd. A machine weighing 15 to 30 tonnes drives into the stand to fell trees that weigh about 80 kilograms, and more than 20% of the forest floor is cleared just to make trails for it, compacting soil, damaging roots and disrupting water flows. AirForestry, founded in Uppsala, replaces the machine with electric multicopter drones: the drone identifies a tree with computer vision, grips its top, delimbs it using gravity, cuts it near the ground and flies it to the roadside.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, ADATHA, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from March 2025 to May 2027. The project frames the prize in European terms: forests cover 43% of Europe's land, absorb about 10% of its annual CO2 emissions, support more than 3.6 million jobs and about €640 billion a year of industry, while thinning machinery emits around 10 million tonnes of CO2 a year from diesel.

The milestone that is hard to argue with

On 22 May 2026 the company reported two things at once: trees harvested in a real production stand, and a fully autonomous sequence completed on its test field, where the drone flew to position, identified the tree, harvested it and dropped it off. Those are separate achievements, autonomy in controlled conditions and real harvesting in a working forest, and the company is careful to present them separately. It also reports operating in temperatures from minus 20 to plus 25 degrees, gusts to 13 metres per second, rain and snow.

The same month it announced a collaboration with leading forestry companies, and its seed round in 2024 already included Sveaskog, Sweden's state forest owner, as an investor. For a machine that has to be accepted by a conservative industry, having the largest landowner in the country on the cap table is a meaningful signal.

What the grant bought, in the company's own words

AirForestry has published an unusually candid account of what the EIC money is for. The project centres on the harvesting tool, with the goal of a robust, reliable, modular system that works on pine, spruce and birch. "Thanks to the EIC support, we can focus on one of our biggest technical challenges: developing a robust and reliable harvesting system," co-founder Olle Gelin said in a September 2026 post, adding that the grant gave the company "time and opportunity to develop and demonstrate the technology before the next funding step".

Two further details stand out. The company says it has now received an equity term sheet from the EIC, which would mean the blended award's second half is in progress rather than theoretical. And it describes the EIC's own due diligence as useful: getting through the review "is a seal of quality" that it expects to make the next raise easier. ADATHA is at its halfway point, and the goal at the end is a harvesting system ready for commercial pilot operations.

1. Harvest a tree from the airDoneFirst harvest in a real forest, May 2026.
2. Autonomous harvest cycleOn the test fieldDemonstrated in controlled conditions.
3. Robust harvesting tool for boreal speciesIn developmentThe EIC project's central deliverable, at its halfway point.
4. Commercial pilot operationsNot startedTargeted for the end of the project in May 2027.

Numbers to treat carefully

The environmental claims are large and come from the company: up to 8% more forest growth over an 80-year cycle, 516 million tonnes of additional carbon sequestered globally a year if fully scaled, 23 million tonnes in Sweden, and about half the energy per thinned tree against conventional methods. The project adds almost three times the commercial value per hectare and about 90 tonnes more CO2 stored per hectare from frequent gentle thinning. None of these has been independently verified, and all of them depend on a fleet operating at a scale that does not yet exist.

The economic figure is more concrete: forest owners globally spend €14 billion a year on thinning alone, which is the market the drones would sell into.

Forestry is where European climate accounting happens

Europe's land use sector is supposed to absorb carbon, and the EU's forest carbon sink has been shrinking, which makes anything that raises forest growth politically valuable as well as commercially. AirForestry sits in the Swedish forest machinery tradition, with a founder who ran one of the world's largest forest automation projects at the research institute Skogforsk, and the company has been presenting at the FOREST EUROPE ministerial conference as well as at EIC drone events. The EIC's climate action tracker for this project is at 100%.