Saudi Aramco backs Mitti Labs' $9.5M Series A for rice farming tech
Original: Saudi Aramco backs India’s Mitti Labs to make Asia’s rice farming more water-resilient
Why This Matters
Scaling AI-driven sustainable agriculture to millions of smallholder farmers could redefine Asia's carbon credit and agri-tech markets.
Climate-tech startup Mitti Labs raised $9.5M in a Series A led by Aramco Ventures to expand its GeoAI platform across Asia, helping smallholder rice farmers cut water use by 40% and methane emissions by over 50% using satellite imagery and AI.
Mitti Labs, headquartered in New York and Bengaluru, has closed a $9.5 million Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco. Additional investors include Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. Total funding now stands at $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round from July 2024.
The startup's GeoAI platform combines synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery — with resolutions ranging from 50 cm to 10 meters — with proprietary field datasets to create digital twins of individual rice fields. This enables remote monitoring of crop growth, soil moisture, flooding, and methane emissions across smallholder farms averaging one hectare each.
Farmers enrolled in Mitti Labs' programs adopt alternate irrigation practices that the company says reduce water use by approximately 40% and methane emissions by more than 50%, without impacting yields. Participants also earn additional income through carbon credits.
Since its first season in 2024, Mitti Labs has scaled from 8,000 to more than 100,000 farmers across several Indian states, with a target of reaching millions of smallholder farmers by 2030. The company now employs over 150 people, primarily in India. Revenue is generated from both carbon credit sales and the GeoAI platform, with customers including carbon marketplace Cool Effect, which counts Google and American Airlines among its clients.