Xavier Laguarta And Devdut Dalal Win Aramco Backing For Mitti Labs Rice Climate Platform

Mitti Labs has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, putting an India-focused rice farming climate platform into a larger Asian expansion story. TechCrunch reported that the New York and Bengaluru headquartered startup uses satellite imagery, artificial intelligence and field operations to help rice farmers cut water use and methane emissions. The round also included Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund and Volta Circle, and it takes the company's total funding to $12.5 million.

The founder story is central. TechCrunch's earlier profile reported that Xavier Laguarta and Devdut Dalal co-founded Mitti Labs after meeting at Harvard Business School, with Nathan Torbick later joining as CTO. AgFunderNews also identified the founders as Laguarta, Dalal and Torbick and described the company as focused on rice-farming methane reduction. The current funding makes the founders' crop-specific bet more visible: instead of building a broad agriculture software tool, Mitti Labs is trying to become deeply specialised in rice, one of Asia's most water-intensive and climate-sensitive staples.

The company is attacking a hard measurement problem. Rice fields kept continuously flooded emit methane, while many smallholder farms are too small and dispersed for simple manual monitoring. TechCrunch reported that Mitti Labs' GeoAI platform combines synthetic aperture radar imagery from commercial and public satellites with years of field measurements. The goal is to create digital twins of individual rice fields so the company can monitor crop growth, flooding, soil moisture, water use and methane emissions across thousands of farms without measuring every plot directly.

The operational scale has changed quickly. Laguarta told TechCrunch that Mitti Labs has grown from about 8,000 farmers in its first season in 2024 to more than 100,000 this season across several Indian states, with ambitions to reach millions of smallholder farmers by 2030. The company now has more than 150 employees, most based in India, and field teams work with local organisations to help farmers adopt alternate irrigation practices. Its own partnership material with ACCESS has described farmer onboarding and training across rural Andhra Pradesh, showing the work is not just remote sensing from an office.

For farmers, the promise is practical only if the methods do not reduce yields or push risk onto already vulnerable households. TechCrunch reported that Mitti Labs says its alternate irrigation practices can reduce water use by about 40 percent and methane emissions by more than 50 percent without affecting yields, while also generating carbon credits as an additional income source. AgFunderNews previously reported that the company works with partners and research institutions on measurement systems, including remote sensing and on-ground methane data.

Aramco Ventures' participation gives the round a wider significance because TechCrunch reported it is the Saudi energy giant venture arm's first investment in an Indian startup. Laguarta said Aramco was attracted by the focus on methane reduction, water resilience and AI in agriculture. The partnership may also give Mitti Labs access to carbon-market relationships, which matters because the startup earns revenue from both carbon credits and its GeoAI platform. TechCrunch named Cool Effect, Ebro Foods and Syngenta among its customers or users.

The next move is regional. Mitti Labs plans to enter the Philippines later this year and expand into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. That expansion will test whether a model refined in Indian rice systems can adapt to different irrigation networks, carbon markets and farmer organisations. The funding is a milestone, but the hard work remains local: persuading farmers, proving emissions reductions, keeping carbon credits credible and making water-saving practices pay in seasons shaped by heat, rain variability and rural income pressure.