Nature Robots, a technology company founded in Osnabrück in 2022 and a spin-off of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), has closed a seed financing round totaling €4 million.
Participants in the round include Climentum Capital, Bayern Kapital, and Planetary Impact Ventures. With the fresh capital, the company is scaling its modular autonomy software for agricultural machinery, expanding its team, and establishing an additional location in Munich.
Nature Robots develops software that enables agricultural machinery to operate autonomously in large fields, vegetable farming, viticulture and fruit growing, specialty crops, as well as in agri-photovoltaics and agroforestry systems.
The modular software system enables machine manufacturers to implement exactly the functions they need on their equipment without having to develop and maintain their own autonomy technology from scratch over the course of years.
Embedded in the Agrotech Valley around Osnabrück – a leading European ecosystem for agricultural systems technology centered around global market leaders such as Amazone, Claas, Grimme, and Krone – Nature Robots benefits from over a decade of cutting-edge research by the DFKI as well as the University and Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences in the field of agricultural AI and robotics.
Nature Robots bridges the gap between AI-based high-tech robotics and organic farming. As an award-winning science spin-off, the company offers high-precision navigation and monitoring AI that enables robots and machines to move autonomously in both simple and complex environments – from large conventional fields to organic farming and complex regenerative agriculture.
A prominent example is laser weeding, which eliminates weeds with millimeter precision. Such spot-farming solutions reduce the use of pesticides to a minimum. They form the basis for ecologically and economically sustainable farming.
The company has a proven track record of funding and competition success: In 2021, the founding team received funding inside the DFKI through the “Exist Research Transfer Program”.
In early 2025, Nature Robots secured €2.5 million through the EIC Accelerator as one of 71 startups out of over 1,200 that made it to the jury in Brussels.
In the same year, Nature Robots was named to the Thrive Top 100, placing it among the world’s leading 15 companies in the field of AI and automation in agriculture – selected from more than 2,000 applications from over 30 countries.
In addition to its inclusion in the Thrive TOP 100, winning the High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) Acceleration Award at Deep Tech Momentum underscores the company’s technological relevance: From over 5,000 European deep-tech startups, Nature Robots was selected as one of the top 100 companies (DTM100) and invited to Berlin. Toward the end of the year, Nature Robots was also honored with the KfW Award Gründen (Lower Saxony).
Since the global food system is responsible for over 31 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture is facing a radical turning point.
In the face of a rapidly aging farming population and a growing global population, Nature Robots addresses the critical shortage of skilled workers with state-of-the-art, AI-based autonomy, which further serves as the foundation for spot farming and decision support systems.
In a market environment characterized by 40 percent degraded soil and massive cost pressures, Nature Robots’ technology provides the foundation for light agricultural machinery and tractors, an essential solution for sustainable soil conservation.
Through technological innovations such as “laser weeding” and “spot farming”, the company enables a drastic reduction in chemical inputs of up to 90 percent, combining ecological necessity with economic efficiency.
Nature Robots thus enables a scalable transformation of the sector from resource-intensive monocultures to profitable, sustainable, and regenerative systems that can additionally reduce CO2e emissions by up to 25 percent through AI-supported mission planning.
Funds from the seed round will primarily go toward team expansion, including an office in Munich. Another focus is on accelerating project-specific design-in phases to enable the autonomous software to be deployed more quickly across customers’ entire machine fleets.
Dr Sebastian Pütz, CEO and co-founder, Nature Robots, says: “Agriculture faces a ‘triple threat’: We must feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050, while the average age of farmers is already 58. At the same time, traditional agricultural systems account for over 30 percent of global emissions, and 40 percent of our soil is already degraded.
“Our autonomy platform enables machinery manufacturers to embark on the necessary transformation very quickly without having to invest billions in in-house development. With this seed round, we can systematically tap into the core markets.”
