Mitti Labs raised $9.5M in Series A from Aramco Ventures, others

Deeptech startup Mitti Labs has secured $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Aramco Ventures. The round also saw participation from Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. With this, the cumulative funding raised by Mitti Labs stands at $12.5 million.

In a statement, the company said that it will expand its geographical footprint in India and launch greenfield projects in the Philippines and Indonesia. Aramco Ventures is Saudi Aramco’s venture arm.

"In parallel, Mitti Labs will scale its GeoAI platform, a satellite technology that fuses high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with field-collected ground truth and physical models to generate digital twins of Asia's rice fields at the resolution of individual plots," read the statement. 

Mitti Labs is a climate-tech startup focused on reducing methane emissions from rice farming while helping smallholder farmers earn additional income through carbon credits. It combines satellite imagery, AI, agronomy, and on-ground operations to monitor farming practices and quantify methane reductions at the field level. Founded by Devdut Dalal, Xavier Laguarta, and Nathan Torbick, the company is working with Indian rice farmers to reduce methane emissions from paddy fields using a technique called Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD). 

“Growing more rice with less water is one of the world’s major challenges. Demand for rice continues to grow, but record heat and changing rainfall patterns are threatening water systems and endangering food security. With our technology and scalable operational model, we can transform how rice is grown, lower emissions, and cut water consumption while building resilient livelihoods for 150 million smallholder farmers,” said Laguarta in a statement. 

Zayed AlAmri, Executive Managing Director at Aramco Ventures, said, “Rice covers a fifth of

Asia’s cultivated land, and it is both a major source of methane and one of the most waterintensive 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.”