An electric drone has felled a tree and flown it clear of a working forest without a single ground machine, completing every step of the harvest on its own. That is according to Norrsken Evolve general partner Alex Bakir, whose firm backs AirForestry, the Uppsala-based green technology company developing the airborne thinning system, and who confirmed the result at the weekend.
Bakir, who has watched the drone move from prototype to a working stand, did not understate the moment, calling the autonomous harvest the first of its kind anywhere. AirForestry says its drone felled trees in a working production forest and, separately, completed an end-to-end harvest without human control — each a first for the airborne thinning method it has built since 2020.
Conventional thinning relies on machines weighing 20 tonnes or more, driven deep into the stand to fell trees that themselves weigh as little as 80 kilograms. AirForestry estimates that more than 20 per cent of the forest floor is damaged simply to move that machinery into position, with forest owners worldwide spending around €14 billion a year on the operation.
Built to avoid all of it, the company’s drone flies above the canopy on an electric powertrain that leaves no wheel tracks, no soil compaction and no root damage. Its 6.2-metre carbon-fibre airframe carries a purpose-built harvesting tool that grips a tree from the top, delimbs it on the way down, cuts it close to the ground and carries the trunk out to the nearest road.
The system is designed to work in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees, through rain and snow and in wind gusts of 13 metres a second, the conditions that define a Nordic thinning season. The drone can carry 200 kilograms, comfortably above the 40-140 kilogram range of the thinning-grade trees it is designed to remove.
AirForestry puts hard figures behind the method. It estimates that the approach yields around 8 per cent more timber across a full harvest cycle, and that removing ground machinery from Swedish thinning alone would keep 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide stored in standing trees. For Bakir, whose firm has followed the drone from a one-metre prototype in 2020 to a working production stand, the result marks a structural break rather than a one-off test. “The forest floor is no longer where forestry happens,” Bakir said.
Founded in 2020 by Olle Gelin, Mauritz Andersson, Markus Romar and Caroline Walerud, the company has since drawn backing from several of Europe’s largest forest owners. Walerud, who became chief executive in December 2025, has moved AirForestry into a scale-up phase after a €10.3 million seed round led by Northzone late in 2024.
Walerud has set the company an unusually large target, arguing that drone thinning can take a substantial share out of forestry’s carbon emissions against what she describes as almost unlimited customer demand. “I believe that AirForestry could become one of the world’s most important companies,” Walerud said.
The production-forest result also follows AirForestry’s first move beyond Sweden, a project opened in January with the Norwegian state forestry body Statskog in terrain near Trondheim. Statskog manages close to one-fifth of Norway’s forest area, and the trial is testing whether drone thinning can work on the steeper, more rugged terrain that conventional machinery struggles with.
Co-founder Olle Gelin, who led the company through that expansion, says the Norwegian project points to demand well beyond AirForestry’s home market. “This collaboration with Statskog is a significant step in that direction,” Gelin said.
Six aircraft thinning a single stand at once, each flying autonomously, is the operation AirForestry is now building toward. The company has said that fleet configuration is the point at which the cost of airborne thinning matches the ground-based machinery it intends to replace, and it forms the basis for the commercial rollout it is now preparing.
The drone is one front in a far wider shift. Forestry now ranks among the industries most exposed to artificial intelligence — Goldman Sachs analysts have estimated the technology could disrupt 28 per cent of work across the sector, and a recent international summit produced a pledge to put AI to work across the world’s forests.
