Saudi Aramco backs India’s Mitti Labs to make Asia’s rice farming more water-resilient

As rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns put Asia’s water-intensive rice farming under pressure, Mitti Labs, a New York- and Bengaluru-headquartered climate-tech startup, has raised $9.5 million in an investment led by Aramco Ventures, Saudi Aramco’s venture arm, to expand across Asia with a platform that combines satellite imagery, AI, and field operations to help farmers cut water use and methane emissions.

Other investors in the Series A round included existing backer Lightspeed India, as well as Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. With the latest funding, Mitti Labs has now raised $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round in July 2024.

Rice, the staple food for more than half the world’s population, is one of the most water-intensive crops to grow. Rice fields kept under continuous flooding also account for a significant share of agricultural methane emissions.

Since launching its first programs in 2023, Mitti Labs has sought to tackle the heavy water use and methane emissions associated with rice farming through its platform that fuses satellite radar imagery with years of field data collected by its teams. The startup says the technology creates digital twins of individual rice fields, allowing it to monitor crop conditions, water use, and methane emissions across thousands of smallholder farms, where the average holding is about one hectare.

Mitti Labs’ GeoAI platform uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from commercial and public satellites, with resolutions ranging from 50 centimeters to 10 meters, alongside years of field measurements collected by its teams. The startup’s edge lies less in the satellite imagery itself than in the proprietary datasets it has built to train its AI models, allowing it to monitor crop growth, soil moisture, and flooding across smallholder farms remotely, co-founder Xavier Laguarta said in an interview.

Mitti Labs has grown from working with about 8,000 farmers in its first season in 2024 to more than 100,000 this season across several Indian states, Laguarta told TechCrunch. He added that it aims to reach millions of smallholder farmers by 2030.

The startup also now has more than 150 employees, with most of its workforce based in India, where field teams work directly with farmers and local organizations to help them adopt alternate irrigation practices.

Farmers in Mitti Labs’ programs adopt alternate irrigation practices that the company says reduce water use by about 40% and methane emissions by more than 50% without affecting yields, while generating carbon credits that provide an additional source of income.

Mitti Labs generates revenue from both carbon credits and its GeoAI platform. Its customers include carbon marketplace Cool Effect, which works with companies like Google and American Airlines, as well as rice producer Ebro Foods and agricultural company Syngenta, which use Mitti Labs’ data and analytics to improve water resilience across their supply chains.

That traction also helped attract Aramco Ventures, whose investment marks its first in an Indian startup. Laguarta told TechCrunch that the Saudi energy giant’s venture arm was drawn to Mitti Labs’ focus on reducing methane emissions, improving water resilience, and applying AI to agriculture in emerging markets. The partnership, he said, could also help the startup tap into Aramco Ventures’ relationships across carbon markets and potentially work with Aramco itself over time.

“Obviously, Aramco is one of the largest companies in the world, and being able to have them as a partner and potential customer over time is a really interesting position for us to be in,” Laguarta said.

Using the fresh capital, Mitti Labs plans to launch operations in the Philippines later this year, before expanding into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. The move, per Laguarta, would allow Mitti Labs to serve compliance carbon markets alongside the voluntary market where it currently operates, while adapting its operating model to different farming systems and irrigation networks.

“We’re really a data company at the end of the day,” Laguarta said. “When you do these expansions, you’re generating and gathering data from very different ecosystems.”

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