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Saudi Aramco backs India’s Mitti Labs to make Asia’s rice farming more water-resilient
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Mitti Labs raised a $9.5 million Series A led by Aramco Ventures to expand its GeoAI platform, which combines satellite radar imagery with proprietary field data to help rice farmers reduce water use and methane emissions, into the Philippines and Indonesia.
This is Aramco Ventures' first investment in an Indian startup, linking energy-sector capital to agricultural methane reduction as a carbon market opportunity. The expansion into Southeast Asia opens compliance carbon markets beyond the voluntary ones Mitti Labs currently serves, and the platform's ability to monitor smallholder farms at scale across different ecosystems will test whether the data model generalizes beyond India.
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Mitti Labs fuses synthetic aperture radar imagery (50cm to 10m resolution) with proprietary field datasets to create digital twins of individual rice fields, enabling remote monitoring of water use and methane emissions across smallholder farms averaging one hectare.
The company claims its alternate irrigation practices reduce water use by approximately 40% and methane emissions by over 50% without yield loss, generating carbon credits as additional farmer income.
Expansion to the Philippines later this year and Indonesia in 2027 targets compliance carbon markets alongside voluntary markets, requiring adaptation to different farming systems and irrigation networks.
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