The Mitti Labs Series A — a $9.5 million round led by Aramco Ventures — marks a landmark moment for climate-smart agriculture in Asia, as publicly reported on 2026-08-06. Mitti Labs, a deep-tech company headquartered in New York and Bengaluru, combines satellite imagery, AI, and field operations to help smallholder rice farmers cut water use and methane emissions. The round brings the startup’s total funding to $12.5 million.
Quick Highlights
- Founders: Devdut Dalal and Xavier Laguarta Soler (co-founded 2023)
- Lead Investor: Aramco Ventures (venture arm of Saudi Aramco)
- Participating Investors: Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, Volta Circle
- Investor Background: This round marks Aramco Ventures’ first-ever investment in an Indian startup; Lightspeed India returns as an existing backer
- Headquarters: New York, USA and Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
- Announcement Date: 6 August 2026
Funding Breakdown
Use of Funds
Mitti Labs will deploy the fresh capital on three fronts. First, it will deepen its geographical footprint across India. Second, it will launch greenfield projects in the Philippines later in 2026, followed by Indonesia and additional Southeast Asian markets in 2027. Third, it will scale its GeoAI platform — which fuses high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data with field-collected ground truth and physical models — to generate digital twins of individual rice plots for continuous monitoring and carbon accounting. The platform enables the Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) technique, which the company claims can reduce water consumption by up to 40% and methane emissions by nearly 50%.
Funding Timeline
Mitti Labs raised a $3 million seed round in July 2024, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The current $9.5 million Series A brings cumulative funding to $12.5 million, as publicly reported.
Expansion Plans
Beyond its existing operations across multiple Indian states — where its platform currently supports tens of thousands of farmers covering more than 70,000 hectares of farmland — Mitti Labs will launch in the Philippines before the end of 2026. It will then enter Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. This geographic push will also allow the company to serve compliance carbon markets, where emissions reductions are legally mandated, in addition to the voluntary carbon market it already operates in. The company currently employs more than 150 people, predominantly based in India, as publicly reported.
Significance
Aramco Ventures’ decision to make its first-ever India investment in a rice-methane startup signals that water and emissions accounting in agriculture has moved well beyond niche climate advocacy and is now a strategic cost line for major energy companies. Mitti Labs sits at a rare intersection: its GeoAI platform simultaneously addresses food security, water resilience, and verifiable carbon credits — three priorities converging rapidly for both governments and corporations in Asia. The startup’s projects in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have already earned an ‘A’ rating from carbon credit ratings agency Sylvera, lending credibility to its dMRV methodology at a time when market scrutiny of carbon credit quality is intensifying. With a cross-sector syndicate spanning an oil major’s VC arm, a major Indian conglomerate, and a global technology foundation, Mitti Labs is well-positioned to define the emerging category of AI-native agricultural carbon infrastructure.
These details have been verified against multiple publicly available reports as of 2026-08-06.
Stay updated with the latest startup funding news on The Courtroom.
Disclaimer: This report is compiled from publicly available sources and is for informational purposes only; funding figures are as publicly reported and may be subject to change.
