Mitti Labs has announced a $9.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Aramco Ventures, with additional backing from Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.
Rice is a staple food for billions of people, but growing it comes at a steep environmental cost. It is considered the thirstiest crop in the world, using up more than 30 percent of all water drawn for irrigation globally. The flooded paddies that rice needs also release large amounts of methane, a gas that has contributed to roughly a quarter of the planet’s warming so far. As rice demand keeps rising and monsoon rainfall becomes harder to predict, this farming method is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
A Known Farming Method Gets a Technology Upgrade
The core idea behind Mitti Labs is not entirely new. Farmers have long known about a technique called Alternate Wetting and Drying, or AWD, which allows a rice paddy to dry out to a specific level a few times during the growing season instead of remaining flooded the entire time. The field is then rewetted according to a set schedule.
When done correctly, this method can reduce water usage by close to 40 percent and cut methane emissions by more than half, all while keeping crop yields stable. The challenge has never really been the technique itself, but proving that farmers are actually following it correctly and consistently across millions of small farms.
This is the gap Mitti Labs was created to fill. Most of the world’s rice is grown on small, scattered plots, often less than two hectares in size. Because these farms are so numerous and fragmented, reliable information about water usage, farming practices, and emissions has historically been almost impossible to collect.
To solve this, Mitti Labs built a GeoAI platform, developed with support from NASA, that combines high resolution satellite radar imagery with data collected directly from the fields and physical modeling. Together, this creates something like a digital twin of each individual farm plot, allowing the company to track crop health, soil moisture levels, and flooding patterns at the level of a single field rather than relying on broad regional estimates.
Expansion Plans Across Asia
The newly raised capital will be used for two main goals. The first is deepening the company’s presence in India, where Mitti Labs already operates the largest AWD program anywhere in the world. The second is launching new projects in the Philippines and Indonesia, marking the company’s first major push beyond India.
Investors have described the investment as a bet not just on the underlying technology, but on the operational model needed to bring these tools to farms that most data driven companies are simply unable to reach.
Mitti Labs was founded in 2023 and has since grown to a team of 150 employees. With this new round, the company has raised a total of $12.5 million. According to the company, its work so far has helped save an estimated 500 billion liters of water, an amount roughly equal to the annual water supply of the entire city of Bengaluru.
The broader idea driving this investment is straightforward. Rice farming affects more people and consumes more water than almost any other human activity on Earth, and the technology needed to change that safely, field by field, is finally catching up to the scale of the problem.
