The Rijen-based startup, which retrofits existing sprayers with nozzle-by-nozzle PWM control, will use the capital to commercialize its LeapEye camera system and scale LeapBox internationally from Europe to Canada.
The idea behind BBLeap is disarmingly simple: Most agricultural sprayers treat an entire field as a unit, applying the same dose of pesticide, herbicide or fertilizer regardless of what individual plants actually need.
BBLeap was designed under the premise that this is wasteful, inaccurate, and unnecessary, and that the technology to do something better has been around for so long that there’s no good excuse not to use it.
The Dutch startup based in Rijen in North Brabant has raised €5 million in a round led by Utrecht-based private equity firm ESquare Capital, with co-investment from Yield Lab Europe, an impact-focused agri-food venture capital fund backed by the European Investment Fund.
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Existing shareholders, including BOM (the Brabant Development Agency, one of the company’s early backers) and Beheermaatschappij Vriend also participated. BBLeap will use the capital to complete the commercial launch of LeapEye, its large-scale arable camera detection system, and expand LeapBox internationally, adding Canada to its existing presence in Europe and Australia.
BBLeap was founded in 2019 by Peter Millenaar, Rieks Kampman and Martijn van Alphen, three people with backgrounds in the agricultural machinery industry who previously worked together at a sprayer manufacturer. Millenaar, who serves as CEO, has described the company’s mission as “farming at plant level,” giving each individual plant exactly the dose it needs rather than spreading the average across a field.
The company’s core product, the LeapBox, is a modular pulse width modulation (PWM) system that can be retrofitted to any existing sprayer, regardless of brand or age, and independently controls each nozzle to maintain constant pressure, droplet size and precise volume.
A cloud-based platform, LeapSpace, processes high-resolution prescription maps generated from drone, satellite and sensor data.
The second product, LeapEye, expands the system’s capabilities with real-time detection: a large-area camera that scans crops as the sprayer moves across a field, detects what needs to be treated, and adjusts the performance of each nozzle accordingly.
According to the company, depending on the application, chemical savings of between 20 and 99 percent and an increase in capacity of up to 40 percent are possible. These figures are derived from proprietary materials and have not been independently verified.
What has received independent validation is the technology itself: BBLeap recently received approval from Germany’s Julius Kühn Institute (JKI), the Federal Research Center for Plant Protection, for its PWM spray approach, a significant regulatory endorsement in the European agricultural market.
The company says it already has more than 200 users operating BBLeap systems in Europe and Australia, with rollout currently underway in Canada. Both the number of users and the geographical information come from press materials and have not been independently confirmed.
What is independently documented is the breadth of the partnership: BBLeap has worked with precision farming data platform OneSoil in a global integration that allows farmers to convert satellite prescription cards into BBLeap spray orders in minutes, and has established relationships with sprayer manufacturers including Denmark’s Dammann.
“BBLeap offers 100 percent certainty of spraying exactly what is needed, delivering good applications, fewer diseases and fewer weeds, while using significantly fewer chemicals,” Peter Millenaar said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The investment comes at a time when regulatory pressure on the use of agricultural chemicals is increasing in Europe. The EU’s “Farm to Fork” strategy aims to halve pesticide use by 2030. Precision spraying technologies are one of the cleaner routes farmers can take to achieve this goal without sacrificing yield.
For BBLeap, the challenge is to translate a technology proven in field trials and early adopters into a commercially repeatable product that can be sold, installed and supported at the scale investors are now betting on.
