Mitti Labs Raises $9.5 Million Series A Led by Aramco Ventures for Rice Farming Water Resilience Technology

Mitti Labs, a deep-tech startup based in New York and Bengaluru, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Aramco Ventures. The capital, which brings the company's total funding to $12.5 million, will support the expansion of its GeoAI satellite platform. The technology helps smallholder rice farmers transition to Alternate Wetting and Drying techniques, which cut water usage by 40% and methane emissions by 50% to combat the environmental toll of traditional flooded rice cultivation.

Mitti Labs Series A

• ▪The $9.5 million Series A round brought the total funding raised by Mitti Labs to $12.5 million.
• ▪Mitti Labs raised $9.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Aramco Ventures.
• ▪The Series A funding round included participation from Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.

Rice water consumption challenge

• ▪Rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns threaten water systems and endanger food security for rice farming.
• ▪Rice is the world's most water-intensive crop, consuming more than 30% of all global irrigation water.

Methane emissions from rice

• ▪Rice fields cover a fifth of Asia's cultivated land and represent a major source of agricultural methane emissions.
• ▪Traditional rice farming practices where fields are continuously flooded generate methane emissions, a greenhouse gas responsible for one-third of climate warming to date.

Alternate Wetting Drying technology

• ▪Alternate Wetting and Drying techniques reduce rice farming water usage by approximately 40% and methane emissions by more than 50% while maintaining crop yields.
• ▪Mitti Labs has scaled its Alternate Wetting and Drying programs to save 500 billion liters of water since its launch in 2023.

GeoAI satellite platform

• ▪Mitti Labs' GeoAI platform combines high-resolution synthetic aperture radar satellite data with field-collected ground truth to generate digital twins of individual rice fields.
• ▪The GeoAI platform was developed with support from NASA to provide field-level insights on crop health, soil moisture, and flooding across fragmented smallholder plots.

Geographic expansion plans

• ▪Mitti Labs plans to launch operations in the Philippines in late 2026 before expanding into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027.
• ▪Mitti Labs intends to use the Series A funds to expand its geographical footprint in India and launch greenfield projects in the Philippines and Indonesia.

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