The triumphant groundbreaking solution might soon transform soil testing on farms across the globe.
The NIRBY startup, founded by Poland's Piotr Lazarek, became the sole winner of this year's prestigious Penn President's Sustainability Prize, handed out annually by the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Each year teams from leading educational institutions around the world compete for the award, presenting the past year's innovations of their design with potential to change the world.
The Pole's innovative NIRBY project received a significant award amounting to $150,000 - and even more importantly, his revolutionary agricultural technology concept has been noticed and rated highest in a very competitive environment, which sets the tone for global innovations in the domain.
The NIRBY project developed an experimental drone that autonomously collects soil samples and analyzes them in the field, reducing the results reading process from days (as was the case so far) to near real-time.
The technology applied stems from Kraków's AGH University of Science and Technology work on the Mars rovers - and it is intended to help farmers with precise fertilization and field mapping. The Pole's project was recognized for its contribution to sustainable agriculture, and for its innovative approach to precision farming.
The Penn President's Sustainability Prize is awarded annually by the University of Pennsylvania. It is one of the most prestigious startup competitions in the United States, with hundreds of projects from around the world competing for attractive financial prizes and global recognition.
Piotr Łazarek, who currently studies at the UPenn, is a 24-year-old Polish entrepreneur and innovator hailing from the southern city of Bielsko-Biała. He gained international recognition for his groundbreaking advancements in precision agriculture - starting with an ion-selective analyzer accelerating soil condition assessments he developed at the age of 16. Two years later, he became the first Polish student in history to win first place at Intel ISEF, the world’s largest science and engineering fair for young researchers.
After completing his secondary education at Dulwich College in the UK, Łazarek was accepted into the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, the world’s top program combining business and engineering. This highly selective program admits only ten students from outside the United States each year and allows him to simultaneously pursue a degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Business Analytics at The Wharton School. In 2024, Piotr was honored with the Naren Udayagiri Scholarship Award, granted to the program’s top student.
In 2023, Piotr founded NIRBY, a startup developing a farm management system that integrates satellite data, autonomous drones for spectroscopic soil analysis, and machine learning algorithms. NIRBY has received multiple awards, including the Richard and Ellen Perlman Grand Prize, Thakker Family Startup Challenge Award, Jacobson Social Impact Prize, Management & Technology Innovation Fund Award, and Wharton Innovation Fund Award. The company has also been awarded the Penn Entrepreneurship Miller Innovation Fellowship and VentureWell Pioneer and Propel Grants.
Prior to winning the 2025 Penn President's Sustainability Prize, Łazarek won the 2024 UPenn Startup Challenge, the largest university business competition on the East Coast of the United States - securing $80,000 in funding, and presented NIRBY to the President of Poland. Further on, his company has secured multiple public grants to advance its technology, including $500,000 for securing first place among 2,641 companies in a Polish Agency for Enterprise Development competition, as well as $70,000 from the National Centre for Research and Development.
In 2025 Piotr Łazarek made in onto the prestigious Forbes' "30 under 30" list (Polish edition).
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Source: farmer.pl, LinkedIn.com