Saudi Aramco's venture arm backs India's Mitti Labs in $9.5M round

As rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns strain Asia’s water-intensive rice farming, Mitti Labs, a New York- and Bengaluru-headquartered climate-tech startup, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, Saudi Aramco’s venture arm, to expand across Asia with a platform combining satellite imagery, AI, and field operations to help farmers cut water use and methane emissions. Other investors included existing backer Lightspeed India, plus Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. The round brings Mitti Labs’ total funding to $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round in July 2024.

Rice, the staple food for more than half the world’s population, is among the most water-intensive crops to grow, and fields kept under continuous flooding account for a significant share of agricultural methane emissions. Since launching its first programs in 2023, Mitti Labs has built a GeoAI platform that fuses synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery — with resolutions from 50 centimeters to 10 meters — with years of field data its teams have collected, creating what it calls digital twins of individual rice fields to monitor crop conditions, water use, and methane emissions across thousands of smallholder farms, where the average holding is about one hectare. Co-founder Xavier Laguarta told TechCrunch the company’s edge lies less in the satellite imagery itself than in the proprietary datasets it has built to train its AI models.

The company has grown from about 8,000 farmers in its first season in 2024 to more than 100,000 this season across several Indian states, Laguarta said, and now employs more than 150 people, most based in India, where field teams work directly with farmers and local organizations to help them adopt alternative irrigation practices that the company says reduce water use by about 40% and methane emissions by more than 50% without affecting yields, while generating carbon credits for farmers as an added income source. Mitti Labs earns revenue from both carbon credits and its GeoAI platform, with customers including carbon marketplace Cool Effect — which works with companies like Google and American Airlines — as well as rice producer Ebro Foods and agricultural company Syngenta.

That traction helped attract Aramco Ventures, whose investment marks its first in an Indian startup. Laguarta said the Saudi energy giant’s venture arm was drawn to Mitti Labs’ focus on reducing methane emissions, improving water resilience, and applying AI to agriculture in emerging markets, and that the partnership could help the startup tap Aramco Ventures’ carbon-market relationships and potentially work with Aramco itself over time. “Obviously, Aramco is one of the largest companies in the world, and being able to have them as a partner and potential customer over time is a really interesting position for us to be in,” he said. With the new capital, Mitti Labs plans to launch in the Philippines later this year before expanding into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027, which Laguarta said would let it serve compliance carbon markets alongside the voluntary market it currently operates in, while adapting to different farming systems and irrigation networks. Mitti Labs aims to reach millions of smallholder farmers by 2030.

Why it matters

A major oil company’s venture arm backing a methane-reduction startup signals how carbon-market economics and AI-driven monitoring are pulling capital from unexpected sources into climate adaptation for staple-crop agriculture across Asia.