Climate-tech startup Mitti Labs has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, marking the oil major's first investment in an Indian startup. The round also drew participation from existing backer Lightspeed India alongside new investors Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund and Volta Circle, taking the company's total funding to $12.5 million since it was founded in 2023 by Devdut Dalal and Xavier Laguarta Soler.
Headquartered in Bengaluru and New York, Mitti Labs has built a GeoAI platform that combines synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery — capable of collecting data through cloud cover and at night — with ground-level field measurements to construct digital "twins" of individual rice plots. The technology helps farmers adopt alternate wetting and drying, an irrigation technique that reduces the extended flooding of paddy fields, which the company says can cut water usage by up to 40% and methane emissions by around 50%, while maintaining crop yields.
Rice feeds more than half the world's population but is among the most water- and methane-intensive crops to cultivate, making it a significant but underaddressed target for agricultural climate technology. Mitti Labs generates revenue both from a subscription-style GeoAI platform and from verified carbon credits, which it sells to corporations pursuing net-zero commitments after verifying farmers' adoption of water-efficient practices. The company's projects in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have received an "A" rating from carbon credit ratings agency Sylvera, a signal of quality that has helped attract corporate carbon buyers including Cool Effect, Ebro Foods and Syngenta.
Mitti Labs has scaled from roughly 8,000 participating farmers in 2024 to more than 100,000 this season across several Indian states, and says it now employs more than 150 people, most of them in India supporting field operations. The fresh capital will fund expansion within India and entry into new Asian markets, including the Philippines and Indonesia, as the company targets reaching millions of farmers by 2030. Aramco Ventures' Xavier Laguarta said the firm was drawn to Mitti Labs' focus on reducing methane emissions, improving water resilience and applying AI to agriculture in emerging markets, adding that the partnership could open access to Aramco's broader carbon-market relationships.
The investment is notable for what it signals about the shifting geography of climate capital: a Gulf oil major's venture arm backing a rice-farming methane reduction platform in India reflects both growing recognition among fossil-fuel-linked investors of the need to diversify into climate technology, and the increasing credibility of Indian climate-tech startups on the global stage.
