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The Rijen-based startup, which retrofits existing sprayers with PWM nozzle-by-nozzle control, will use the capital to commercialize its LeapEye camera system and scale LeapBox internationally, from Europe to Canada.
The idea behind BBLeap is astonishingly simple: most agricultural sprayers treat an entire field as a single unit, applying the same dose of pesticide, herbicide or fertilizer regardless of what individual plants actually need.
BBLeap was built on the premise that this is wasteful, imprecise, and unnecessary, and that the technology to do something better has been around long enough that there’s no good excuse not to use it.
The Dutch startup, based in Rijen, 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 also participated, including BOM (the Brabant Development Agency, one of the company’s first sponsors) and Beheermaatschappij Vriend. BBLeap will use the capital to complete the commercial launch of LeapEye, its extensive camera detection system for arable crops, and to 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 experience in agricultural machinery who had previously worked together at a sprayer manufacturer. Millenaar, who serves as CEO, has described the company’s mission as “Growing at the plant level,” giving each plant exactly the dose it needs, rather than averaging the entire field.
The company’s flagship product, LeapBox, is a modular pulse width modulation (PWM) system that can be retrofitted to any existing sprayer regardless of brand or age, controlling each nozzle independently to maintain constant pressure, consistent droplet size, and precise volume.
LeapSpace, a cloud-based platform, handles high-resolution prescription maps generated from data from sensors, satellites and drones.
The second product, LeapEye, extends the system’s capability to real-time detection: a wide camera that scans crops as the sprayer moves across the field, identifies what needs to be treated, and adjusts the output of individual nozzles accordingly.
According to the company, this allows chemical reductions of between 20% and 99% depending on the application, along with a capacity increase of up to 40%. Those figures come from the company’s own 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 crop protection, for its PWM spraying 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, and a launch is currently underway in Canada. Both the user count and geographic claims come from press materials and have not been independently confirmed.
What is independently documented is the breadth of the partnership: BBLeap has collaborated with precision agriculture data platform OneSoil on a global integration that allows farmers to convert satellite prescription maps into BBLeap spray jobs in a matter of minutes, and has established relationships with sprayer manufacturers, including Danish company Dammann.
“BBLeap offers 100% certainty to spray exactly what is needed, providing 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 of increased regulatory pressure on the use of agricultural chemicals in Europe. The EU Farm to Fork Strategy set the goal of halving pesticide use by 2030, and precision spray technologies are among the cleanest paths farmers can take to reach that goal without sacrificing yield.
For BBLeap, the challenge is to translate a technology that has proven effective in field testing and with early adopters into a commercially repeatable product that can be sold, installed and supported at the scale its investors are now banking on.
