PRNewswire

Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India]/ New York [US], August 5: Deep-tech company Mitti Labs today announced a $9.5 million Series A round from investors including Aramco Ventures as lead investor, alongside Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.

With this new funding, the company will expand its geographical footprint in India and launch greenfield projects in the Philippines and Indonesia. In parallel, Mitti Labs will scale its GeoAI platform, a satellite technology that fuses high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with field-collected ground truth and physical models to generate digital twins of Asia's rice fields at the resolution of individual plots.

Rice feeds half the world daily, but growing it takes an outsized toll on the planet. As the world's most water-intensive crop, rice consumes more than 30% of all irrigation water. Traditional farming practices where fields are continuously flooded also generate the emission of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) responsible for one third of climate warming to date.

Science-backed, low-cost transitions to alternate irrigation techniques cut water usage by close to 40%, and methane emissions by more than 50%, while maintaining yields when practiced safely and rigorously.

'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,' said Mitti Labs' co-founder Xavier Laguarta.

The majority of the world's rice is grown on fragmented plots of less than two hectares where reliable data on practices, yields, water use, and emissions does not exist. Mitti Labs' GeoAI platform, developed with support from NASA, was built to address this gap. It leverages AI to transform raw SAR satellite data into field-level insights on crop health, soil moisture, and flooding. These insights are used to optimize irrigation practices that help conserve water and cut emissions across diverse rice varieties and agro-ecological zones.

Zayed AlAmri, Executive Managing Director at Aramco Ventures, said, 'Rice covers a fifth of Asia's cultivated land, and it is both a major source of methane and one of the most water-intensive crops grown. Changing farming practices is not easy, but the harder part has 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.'

'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,' said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India.

'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,' said Burjis Godrej, Godrej Industries Group.

On the operational side, Mitti Labs has established a farmer-centered model that leverages this technology to implement the practice shift to Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) on a large scale. Since launching in 2023, Mitti Labs has scaled to deliver the largest AWD rice program globally.

About Mitti Labs

Mitti Labs combines satellite technology, AI and field operations to create a water and climate resilient future for rice farming. To date, its programs have saved 500 billion liters of water -- the equivalent of Bengaluru's annual supply. Customers include global technology, service, food and agriculture businesses such as Cool Effect, Ebro Foods, and Syngenta. Since launching in 2023, Mitti Labs has grown to 150 employees and secured $12.5 million from investors such as Lightspeed India, Aramco Ventures, Voyager Ventures, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. Visit mittilabs.earth to learn more.

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