Replanting the world's forests from the sky - one seed pod at a time.
The Flash Forest mark: twin chevrons rising from a seed. The startup fires nutrient-packed pods into wildfire-scarred soil that human crews can't safely reach.
Tree planting has looked more or less the same for a century: a person, a shovel, a seedling, and a long walk to the next spot. Flash Forest, a Toronto company founded in 2019, decided the hardest ground - the remote, steep, burned-over land where crews can't safely tread - should be planted from the air instead. Its planters are drones, and its seedlings are pods fired into the soil at roughly one per second.
The idea has a personal origin. Co-founder and chief executive Bryce Jones lived in Kelowna, British Columbia, during the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire, which burned more than 25,000 hectares of forest and parkland. Years later, with a background in mechatronics engineering and tree planting, he started Flash Forest with his brother Cameron Jones, who had worked in climate policy, and Angelique Ahlstrom, now the company's chief strategy officer. The company grew out of the University of Toronto Mississauga's ICUBE startup incubator.
At its core, Flash Forest is an automated reforestation company. It combines unmanned aerial vehicles, aerial mapping software, and proprietary biological seed pods to replant land far faster than manual planting allows. Drones survey a site, telemetry software assesses soil and terrain, and then aerial or ground-based systems deploy seed pods only where trees can realistically survive. Follow-up drones can spray nutrients and monitor how the young trees establish.
The seed pod is the part people underestimate. A team of plant scientists has designed more than 100 pod recipes - each a small, controlled micro-environment packed with nutrients that gives a single seed a better chance to sprout. The mixes span species foresters actually plant: Douglas fir, Western larch, Lodgepole pine, Ponderosa pine, White spruce, Black spruce, and Jack pine among them. It is, in effect, a whole forest packed into biodegradable capsules.
The customer list is unusually broad, and that is part of the point. Flash Forest works with Canadian federal and provincial government agencies, forestry companies, and Indigenous communities, alongside corporate sustainability buyers. Its partners have included the TELUS Pollinator Fund, Natural Resources Canada, Emissions Reduction Alberta, Ecosia, One Tree Planted, Air Transat, and Molson Coors. When the product is restored land - and the carbon and biodiversity that come with it - the buyers span government budgets, industry obligations, and corporate climate spending alike.
One contract shows the model concretely: Natural Resources Canada committed roughly $1.35 million for Flash Forest to plant more than a million trees in wildfire-ravaged areas over two years. The company has also reported multi-year agreements for millions of additional drone-planted trees.
Reforestation faces two stubborn bottlenecks: speed and cost. After a major wildfire, the window to replant is short, the terrain is often dangerous, and labour is expensive and scarce. Traditional crews simply cannot cover enough ground fast enough. Flash Forest's answer is throughput - up to 100,000 seed pods a day per operator, aimed squarely at the land that would otherwise go unplanted. The company is candid that its headline goal, one billion trees by 2028, requires scaling roughly four times a year. That honesty about the math is itself notable.
Flash Forest has also built a Forestry Intelligence Service: drone-based surveys that use machine learning and high-resolution LiDAR to measure species composition, tree height, stem density, and competition. It turns a forest into data before - and after - a single pod is fired, which matters for a market that increasingly demands proof that trees actually survive, not just that seeds were dropped. Restoration, in this framing, is a measurement problem as much as a planting one.
Flash Forest sits in a small but growing field of aerial reforestation companies that includes Mast Reforestation (formerly DroneSeed), AirSeed Technologies, and Dendra Systems, competing more broadly against traditional silviculture crews. Its edge is the combination it has assembled: proprietary seed pod biology, a domestic base of government and industry contracts, and a data layer that ties planting to measurable outcomes. Recognition has followed - the company won the 2021 Index Award, one of design's international honours - but the real test is scale, and the company knows it.
Aerial and ground-based drones fire biological seed pods into the soil at high velocity, planting difficult terrain far faster than manual crews.
Nutrient-packed, biodegradable pods act as a controlled micro-environment for each seed - 100+ species-specific recipes and counting.
Machine learning and high-resolution LiDAR surveys detect species, height, stem density, and competition across a site.
Assesses live environmental conditions so trees are placed uniformly and only where they can actually survive.
Figures are the company's own, comparing its drone method to conventional hand-and-shovel planting. Approximate.
Bryce Jones, Cameron Jones, and Angelique Ahlstrom launch Flash Forest out of UTM's ICUBE incubator.
Early drone-planting demonstrations and fundraising toward the billion-tree goal.
Wins the 2021 Index Award and begins Emissions Reduction Alberta-backed commercial pilots, opening an Edmonton office.
Secures ~$1.35M from Natural Resources Canada to plant 1M+ trees in wildfire-ravaged areas.
Round co-led by the TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good and OurCrowd to scale toward one billion trees.
Reports over three million trees planted and multi-year agreements for millions more.
“We can plant trees five times faster and at roughly one-third the cost of conventional hand-and-shovel methods.”
“To reach one billion trees by 2028, the company needs to scale about four times every year.”