Finnish cleantech company NPHarvest has been awarded up to €1.2 million in funding from Business Finland’s Deep Tech Accelerator (DTA) to accelerate the scale‑up and commercialisation of its nutrient recovery technology. The staged funding package supports the development of systems that convert liquid waste streams into market‑ready fertilizer inputs, offering a potential lifeline to waste‑to‑energy operators struggling with nutrient overload.
Waste-to-energy growth drives urgent need for nutrient recovery solutions
A surge in Europe’s organic waste-to-energy capacity is generating increasing volumes of nutrient-rich liquid digestate, especially in regions like Northern Germany, Northern France and the Benelux. Under tightening EU limits on nitrogen application, operators can no longer spread this material locally and are instead forced to transport it over longer distances at rising cost.
NPHarvest aims to ease this bottleneck. Its system extracts nitrogen and phosphorus from these liquid waste streams and converts them into usable fertilizer inputs, pushing nutrient recovery beyond pilot projects toward repeatable, industrial deployment.
“In Europe, the limiting factor in fertilizer production is no longer nutrient availability, but how and where those nutrients can be recovered and reused,” said Juho Uzkurt Kaljunen, CEO of NPHarvest. “This funding allows us to translate that constraint into repeatable, scalable deployments.”
Technical progress sets stage for commercial roll-out
The DTA award follows €2.2 million in previous investment from Nordic Foodtech VC, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and others, and caps a year of major technical milestones. In 2025, NPHarvest launched its first industrial-scale demonstrator at a waste-to-energy plant in Ankara, Turkey, and field trials with the University of Helsinki’s Viikki research farm showed its recovered nitrogen and phosphorus perform comparably to conventional synthetic fertilizers.
With DTA funding in place, the company will now move to lock its industrial-scale reactor design and build the supply chain required for broader deployment.
“Our biggest bottleneck is engineering and production capacity,” said Sara Ikonen, COO of NPHarvest. “Once the reactor design is locked, we’ll need to build a supply chain for effective and high-quality production.”
Commercial installations expected from 2026
Speaking to AgTechNavigator, Ikonen outlined the commercialisation timeline:“We’ll start building first commercial installations in 2026, and they’ll start running in 2027. Our first target regions are nutrient hot zones in Western Europe such as Germany and the Netherlands.”
Positioning itself within Europe’s growing nutrient security agenda, NPHarvest argues that local recovery of nitrogen and phosphorus is becoming strategically essential.
“NPHarvest offers local, circular nutrient sources independent of international fertilizer supply chains,” Ikonen said. “Our production of ammonium salts does not require natural gas, further decoupling us from the critical dependencies of the fertilizer industry today.”
