Mitti Labs, a climate technology startup headquartered in New York and Bengaluru, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco. The company plans to use the funding to expand its platform in Asia and help rice farmers reduce water consumption and methane emissions by combining satellite imagery, artificial intelligence and field operations.
Existing and new investors participated in the round, including Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund and Volta Circle. With the new funding, Mitti Labs' total funding has reached $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round closed in July 2024.
A platform for monitoring rice fields
The company is targeting a growing challenge in Asia, where rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are placing additional pressure on rice farming, a water-intensive crop that is a staple food for more than half of the world's population. Fields that remain continuously flooded also contribute a significant share of agricultural methane emissions.
Since launching its first programs in 2023, Mitti Labs has developed a platform that combines synthetic aperture radar imagery, commonly abbreviated as SAR, from commercial and public satellites, with resolutions ranging from 50 centimeters to 10 meters, and field data collected by the company's teams over several years. The company says this system creates digital twins of individual rice fields, enabling it to monitor crop conditions, water use and methane emissions across thousands of small farms.
Co-founder Xavier Laguarta said the company's core advantage lies not in satellite imagery alone, but in the proprietary datasets it has built to train artificial intelligence models, enabling it to remotely monitor crop growth, soil moisture and flooding levels.
Expanding its farmer base and markets
Mitti Labs grew from working with about 8,000 farmers during its first season in 2024 to more than 100,000 farmers this season across several Indian states, according to Laguarta. The company currently has more than 150 employees, most of them based in India, where field teams work directly with farmers and local organizations to adopt alternative irrigation methods.
The company says these practices reduce water consumption by about 40% and methane emissions by more than 50% without affecting yields, while also enabling farmers to generate carbon credits that provide an additional source of income. Mitti Labs generates revenue from carbon credits and its GeoAI platform, and its customer list includes carbon marketplace Cool Effect, rice producer Ebro Foods and agriculture company Syngenta.
The Philippines first, then Indonesia
Aramco Ventures' investment is its first investment in an Indian startup. According to Laguarta, Mitti Labs' focus on reducing methane, strengthening water-sector resilience and applying artificial intelligence to agriculture in emerging markets attracted the interest of Aramco's investment arm. The collaboration could help the startup leverage Aramco Ventures' relationships in carbon markets, with the possibility of working with Aramco itself in the future.
Mitti Labs plans to launch operations in the Philippines during 2026 before expanding to Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets during 2027. Laguarta said this expansion could enable the company to serve compliance carbon markets alongside the voluntary market in which it currently operates, while adapting its operating model to different farming systems and irrigation networks.