Mitti Labs raises $9.5M to build water resilience in Asia's rice fields

Rice feeds half the world every day, but growing it is putting an outsized strain on the planet's water supply. As the most water-intensive crop on Earth, rice consumes more than 30% of all irrigation water. Traditional paddies, kept continuously flooded to suppress weeds, also generate huge volumes of methane, a greenhouse gas now responsible for roughly a quarter of the warming the planet has experienced to date. With demand for rice still climbing and monsoon patterns growing less predictable by the year, that math is becoming harder to sustain.

We are proud to announce that we have raised a $9.5 million Series A to accelerate its answer to that problem. The round was led by Aramco Ventures in their first investment in India, with participation from Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.

The science behind Mitti Labs' approach is not new. Alternate Wetting and Drying, or AWD, lets a paddy dry out to a measured depth a few times during the growing season instead of staying flooded throughout, then rewets it on a set schedule. Practiced safely and rigorously, it cuts water use by close to 40% and methane emissions by more than half, while holding yields steady. What has been missing is not the technique itself but the ability to verify, at scale, that it is actually happening.

That is the gap Mitti Labs was built to close. The vast majority of the world's rice is grown on fragmented plots of less than two hectares, farms too small and too numerous for reliable data on practices, water use, or emissions to exist at all. Mitti Labs' GeoAI platform, developed with support from NASA, fuses high-resolution synthetic aperture radar with field-collected ground truth and physical models to build a digital twin of each plot, tracking crop health, soil moisture, and flooding at the resolution of an individual farm rather than an estimate spread across a region.

"Growing more rice with less water is one of the world's major challenges. Demand for rice continues to grow, but record heat and changing rainfall patterns are threatening water systems and endangering food security. With our technology and scalable operational model, we can transform how rice is grown, lower emissions and cut water consumption while building resilient livelihoods for 150 million smallholder farmers." Xavi Laguarta, Mitti Labs co-founder

The new capital will fund two things at once: deeper expansion across India, where Mitti Labs already runs the largest AWD program in the world, and new greenfield projects in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Our investors framed the raise as a bet on both the technology and the operating model needed to bring it to fields most data companies never reach:

"Rice covers a fifth of Asia's cultivated land, and the harder part has always been knowing what is actually happening in the fields across millions of small farms. That is what Mitti Labs' AI and satellite technology aims to solve." Zayed AlAmri, Executive Managing Director at Aramco Ventures

“As an investor deeply rooted in India, we know firsthand how critical water resilience is for farming communities. Mitti Labs has built a remarkable model that leverages technology towards securing the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. This model has the potential to reshape rice farming all over Asia,” Burjis Godrej, Godrej Industries Group.

“Solving the world’s water crisis requires bringing together smallholder farmers, industry stakeholders, governments, and nonprofits to transform how rice is grown. With its unique technology and vast network of farmer-partners, Mitti Labs can unlock new revenue opportunities tied to this transition and help build the future of rice.” Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India.

Since launching in 2023, Mitti Labs has grown to 150 employees and raised $12.5 million in total. Its work has already saved an estimated 500 billion liters of water, roughly the annual supply for the entire city of Bengaluru.

The bet underlying the round is straightforward: rice farming touches more people and more water than almost any other human activity on the planet, and the tools to change it safely, at the scale of a single field, are only now catching up.