Oil Major's VC Arm Makes First India Bet on Farm Methane Data

Saudi Aramco's venture arm has made its first investment in an Indian startup, and the company it picked measures methane and water use on rice paddies, not anything resembling oil and gas.*

Mitti Labs, a Bengaluru- and New York-based climate-tech startup, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A led by Aramco Ventures, taking its total funding to $12.5 million as it prepares to expand its satellite-based rice-farming monitoring platform into the Philippines and Indonesia.

Rice is among the most water-intensive staple crops grown, and paddies kept under continuous flooding are also a major source of agricultural methane, independent of any yield gain that flooding provides. Mitti Labs' pitch is a monitoring layer that can verify, field by field, whether individual smallholders have switched to alternative wetting-and-drying irrigation, the practice that cuts both water draw and methane output and generates carbon credits a developer can sell.

The round matters as much for who wrote the check as for the amount raised. Aramco Ventures choosing a methane-reduction verification platform for its first India bet signals that oil-and-gas capital now treats agricultural emissions data as close enough to its own carbon-market and decarbonization interests to warrant a strategic stake, not only a financial one.

Series A Led by Aramco Ventures, Backed by a Six-Investor Syndicate

Existing backer Lightspeed India returned for the round alongside new investors Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund and Volta Circle. The Series A brings Mitti Labs' total raised to $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round closed in July 2024.

Satellite Radar and Field Data Track Water Use Across 100,000 Farms

The platform combines synthetic aperture radar imagery, at resolutions between 50 centimetres and 10 metres, with years of field measurements its own teams have collected, building a per-field profile it uses to track crop conditions, water levels and methane output remotely. Mitti Labs says it worked with about 8,000 farmers in its first season in 2024 and has grown to more than 100,000 this season across several Indian states, with a workforce of over 150 people, most based in India. The company reports that farmers following its irrigation guidance cut water use by roughly 40% and methane emissions by more than 50% without a yield penalty. Its data and credits are used by carbon marketplace Cool Effect, rice producer Ebro Foods and agribusiness Syngenta

Expansion Plan Targets Compliance Carbon Markets, Not Just Voluntary Credits

Mitti Labs plans to launch in the Philippines later this year, followed by Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. Co-founder Xavier Laguarta said the expansion is meant to let the company serve compliance carbon markets alongside the voluntary market it currently operates in, adapting its model to different irrigation systems along the way. "When you do these expansions, you're generating and gathering data from very different ecosystems," Laguarta said. Whether regulators in those compliance markets will accept satellite-verified MRV data on the same terms voluntary-market buyers already do is the open question the expansion will test.

What to Watch

Watch whether the Philippines launch produces Mitti Labs' first compliance-market-eligible credits, and whether Aramco Ventures follows its first India bet with additional agricultural-MRV or carbon-market investments elsewhere in Asia.

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