Mitti Labs, a climate-tech company headquartered in New York with operations run out of Bengaluru, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco, marking the fund’s first investment in India. Returning investor Lightspeed India was joined by first-time backers Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund and Volta Circle, taking Mitti Labs’ total raised to $12.5 million.
The round is a fairly specific bet on where climate-tech capital is heading next. Rice covers roughly a fifth of Asia’s cultivated land, consumes more than 30% of the world’s irrigation water, and is one of agriculture’s largest single sources of methane because of how continuously flooded paddies work — yet the vast majority of that farming happens on fragmented plots under two hectares, where reliable data on water use, yields and emissions has historically not existed at all. Mitti Labs’ pitch is that satellite radar and AI can generate that missing data at the level of an individual field rather than an entire region, turning what used to be an unmeasurable problem into one large companies can actually underwrite and pay to fix.
Founded in 2023 by Xavier Laguarta Soler, Devdut Dalal and Nate Torbick, Mitti Labs runs a GeoAI platform, developed with NASA support, that fuses high-resolution synthetic aperture radar imagery with years of field-collected ground truth to build digital twins of individual rice plots — tracking soil moisture, flooding and crop health remotely across smallholder farms that have never had this kind of monitoring before. The company says its programs have grown from around 8,000 participating farmers in their 2024 debut season to more than 100,000 across several Indian states today, and that the water-saving irrigation techniques it promotes, primarily alternate wetting and drying, can cut water consumption by roughly 40% and methane emissions by more than half without reducing yields. Clients already paying for that data include carbon marketplace Cool Effect, rice producer Ebro Foods and agrochemical company Syngenta.
“Rice covers a fifth of Asia’s cultivated land, and it is both a major source of methane and one of the most water-intensive crops grown. Changing farming practices is not easy, but the harder part has been knowing what is actually happening in the fields across millions of small farms. That is what Mitti Labs’ AI and satellite technology aims to solve.” said Zayed AlAmri, Executive Managing Director of Aramco Ventures
“Solving the world’s water crisis requires bringing together smallholder farmers, industry stakeholders, governments, and nonprofits to transform how rice is grown. With its unique technology and vast network of farmer-partners, Mitti Labs can unlock new revenue opportunities tied to this transition and help build the future of rice,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India.
“As an investor deeply rooted in India, we know firsthand how critical water resilience is for farming communities. Mitti Labs has built a remarkable model that leverages technology towards securing the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. This model has the potential to reshape rice farming all over Asia,” said Burjis Godrej, Chairperson of Godrej Agrovet
With the fresh capital, Mitti Labs plans to deepen its footprint across India while launching greenfield projects in the Philippines later this year, followed by Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027 — expansion that would let it serve compliance carbon markets, where emissions cuts are legally mandated, alongside the voluntary market it currently operates in. For an oil major’s venture arm, backing a methane-measurement startup working India’s rice belt is a comparatively small cheque, but it signals that water and emissions accounting in agriculture has become a cost line serious enough for energy companies to want a stake in the tools that measure it.
