The Rijen-based startup, which retrofits existing sprayers with nozzle-by-nozzle PWM control, will use the capital to commercialise 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 single unit, applying the same dose of pesticide, herbicide, or fertiliser 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 existed for long enough that there is 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 with backing from the European Investment Fund.
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Existing shareholders including BOM (the Brabant Development Agency, one of the company’s earliest backers) and Beheermaatschappij Vriend also participated. BBLeap will use the capital to complete the commercial release of LeapEye, its broadacre camera detection system for arable farming, and to expand the LeapBox internationally, adding Canada to its existing footprint across Europe and Australia.
BBLeap was founded in 2019 by Peter Millenaar, Rieks Kampman, and Martijn van Alphen, three people with backgrounds in agricultural machinery who had worked together previously at a sprayer manufacturer. Millenaar, who serves as CEO, has described the company’s mission as “Farming on Plant Level”, giving each individual plant exactly the dose it needs, rather than averaging across a field.
The company’s core product, the LeapBox, is a modular pulse-width modulation (PWM) system that can be retrofitted onto any existing sprayer regardless of brand or age, controlling each nozzle independently to maintain constant pressure, consistent droplet size, and precise volume.
A cloud-based platform, LeapSpace, handles high-resolution prescription maps generated from drone, satellite, and sensor data.
The second product, LeapEye, extends the system’s capability into real-time detection: a broadacre camera that scans crops as the sprayer moves across a field, identifying what needs to be treated and adjusting the output of individual nozzles accordingly.
According to the company, this enables chemical reductions of between 20% and 99% depending on the application, alongside 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 centre for crop protection, for its PWM spraying approach, a meaningful regulatory endorsement in the European agricultural market.
The company says it has more than 200 users already operating BBLeap systems across Europe and Australia, with a launch currently underway in Canada. Both the user count and the geographic claims come from press materials and have not been independently confirmed.
What is independently documented is the partnership breadth: BBLeap has collaborated with precision farming data platform OneSoil in a global integration that lets farmers convert satellite prescription maps into BBLeap spray jobs within minutes, and has established relationships with sprayer manufacturers including Danish company Dammann.
“BBLeap provides 100% assurance to spray exactly what is needed, delivering good applications, fewer diseases, and fewer weeds, while using significantly fewer chemicals,” said Peter Millenaar in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The investment arrives at a moment of heightened regulatory pressure on agricultural chemical use in Europe. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy set a target of halving pesticide use by 2030, and precision spraying technologies are among the cleaner paths farmers can take toward that goal without sacrificing yield.
For BBLeap, the challenge is translating a technology that has proved itself in field trials and with early adopters into a commercially repeatable product that can be sold, installed, and supported at the scale its investors are now betting on.
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