Aramco Ventures doesn't typically wade into smallholder agriculture. But on August 6, the investment arm of Saudi Arabia's state oil behemoth led a $9.5 million Series A into Mitti Labs, a two-year-old startup attempting to prove that rice paddies—one of the planet's more stubborn climate problems—can become verifiable carbon-credit factories.
It was the firm's first venture investment in India, a detail Lightspeed India was quick to highlight when the round closed. Lightspeed returned as an investor, alongside Cisco Foundation, Godrej Industries Group, Voyager Ventures, Volta Circle, Francis Family Fund, and a handful of family offices. The funding arrives as Mitti claims to oversee what it describes as "the largest alternate irrigation program on the planet"—a network of more than 100,000 smallholder rice farmers spread across six Indian states.
That scale matters, because rice is a methane factory. And methane, for those keeping score, is a superpollutant with roughly 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a twenty-year horizon.
The methane problem hiding in plain sight
Rice paddies flood the world's dinner tables and the atmosphere in equal measure. A study published in Nature Food last June estimated net greenhouse gas emissions from global rice cultivation at about 1.09 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent annually during the 2010s—a figure that has doubled since the 1960s. Somewhere between 6 and 11 percent of all human-caused methane comes from rice fields, according to a recent analysis in Earth's Future. That puts rice cultivation in the same emissions neighborhood as aviation.
Mitti Labs' answer is an agronomic practice called Alternate Wetting and Drying, or AWD—cycling paddies between flooded and drained states rather than keeping them waterlogged year-round. The International Rice Research Institute has long estimated that AWD can slash methane emissions by 30 to 70 percent and save 30 percent of irrigation water, typically without denting yields. Mitti's own claims are slightly more ambitious: up to 50 percent methane reduction, 40 percent water savings, and farmer incomes rising as much as 30 percent once you factor in credit revenue and lower input costs.
Those are the kinds of numbers that make venture capitalists lean forward. Whether they hold at scale is the experiment now underway.
Building a "soil-to-sky" verification stack
The hard part isn't persuading farmers to drain their fields. It's proving they did it, and proving the methane stayed in the ground.
Mitti stitched together satellite synthetic-aperture radar, ground-based methane flux chambers, and crop-specific AI models into what the company calls a digital measurement, reporting, and verification system—dMRV in industry shorthand. The stack runs soil to sky, cross-referencing orbital data with field sensors to generate audit-ready carbon credits.
That infrastructure earned the startup a Tier 3 certification under Gold Standard's rice methane methodology, alongside an "A" rating from Sylvera for its projects in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Mitti posted the Sylvera score to LinkedIn roughly five days before the Series A announcement, a bit of strategic timing that didn't go unnoticed.
In May 2026, Mitti became the first supplier registered under Isometric's Rice Methane Reduction Protocol. At the time, the company was working with more than 70,000 farmers. Three months later, that figure had climbed past 100,000. Credits are now available through Cool Effect's "superpollutant portfolio" and on the Carbonplace marketplace. Lightspeed named Ebro Foods and Syngenta as customers in its August 6 announcement, though the companies haven't publicly disclosed volume or pricing.
Harvard MBAs meet NASA funding
The founders—Xavier Laguarta Soler and Devdut Dalal, both Harvard Business School MBAs from the class of 2023—launched Mitti with early backing from Harvard Innovation Labs. The technical muscle came from Nathan Torbick, a remote-sensing specialist who now serves as principal investigator on the company's NASA contracts.
NASA awarded Mitti an $850,000 Phase II Ignite contract last September, building on an earlier $150,000 Phase I selection. The company has also partnered with The Nature Conservancy on the PRANA program and recently announced additional NASA funding tied to crop-residue burning emissions, though details on that grant remain scarce.
Mitti raised a $3 million seed in July 2024, co-led by Lightspeed and Voyager Ventures. The company now employs somewhere between 11 and 50 people, according to its LinkedIn profile—a range that suggests either rapid hiring or a degree of organizational opacity.
Southeast Asia, next
With Aramco Ventures on the cap table, Mitti gains a strategic foothold in the Gulf, a region eyeing agricultural carbon offsets as part of broader climate commitments. The fresh capital will fund expansion of the company's GeoAI "ground-truth engine" and entry into Indonesia and the Philippines—two of the world's largest rice producers and, by extension, two of its largest methane sources.
The company says it will deepen resilience programs across the rice value chain while pushing its dMRV infrastructure into Southeast Asia, where millions more hectares of paddies await measurement. Whether the model that works in Telangana translates to Java or Luzon is an open question. So is whether the carbon-credit market can absorb supply at this scale without prices collapsing.
Rice methane reduction has moved from theory to practice faster than many expected. The first Gold Standard rice credits were issued in February 2026, and protocols from Isometric and others have opened paths to scaled verification. Mitti's bet—and now Aramco's—is that a combination of satellite data, field sensors, and farmer economics can turn one of agriculture's largest climate liabilities into a functioning carbon market.
It's a wager that hinges on measurement holding up under scrutiny, buyers continuing to pay, and 100,000 smallholder farmers keeping their fields drained on schedule. Not a small ask.
