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Google has agreed to buy 1 million carbon credits from Indian climate-tech startup Mitti Labs through 2030, in what the companies say is the largest publicly announced deal to date for credits generated from cutting methane emissions in rice farming. The four-year agreement will cover rice farms across the Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, reaching about 100,000 hectares at peak delivery, Mitti Labs co-founder Xavier Laguarta said in an interview. Financial terms were not disclosed. The project will pay farmers to adopt practices that reduce how long rice fields remain flooded, cutting methane released during cultivation while also reducing water use. Mitti Labs says the technique can cut methane emissions by about 50% and irrigation water use by about 40% without reducing crop yields. The deal comes as Google faces the challenge of reaching its goal of going net-zero emissions by 2030 amid investing heavily in artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Its greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 grew 18% year-over-year to about 14.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, per its environmental report (PDF) released in June. Mitti Labs began talks with Google about a year ago, Laguarta told TechCrunch, as the tech company explored adding methane-reduction projects to its carbon-credit portfolio. Google was drawn in part to the project’s water savings and Mitti Labs’ ability to operate at scale, he stated. The startup’s projects have saved more than 500 billion liters of water over the past two years. The Google deal, Laguarta said, would allow Mitti Labs to expand further, giving it the scale needed to work with large corporate buyers. “Having Google, one of the most sophisticated buyers in the market with rigorous due diligence processes, is obviously a good signal for us,” Laguarta said, adding that the deal would allow Mitti to scale significantly. Google’s evaluation included scrutiny of Mitti Labs’ monitoring technology and visits to farms before the companies signed the agreement, Laguarta said. Founded in 2023, the New York- and Bengaluru-based startup has built a GeoAI platform that combines satellite radar imagery with field measurements to remotely track crop growth, soil moisture, and flooding across smallholder farms. The platform uses synthetic aperture radar imagery from commercial and public satellites, with resolutions ranging from 50 centimeters to 10 meters. Mitti also uses proprietary data collected in the field to train its AI models, Laguarta said. The credits sold to Google can be issued under either Gold Standard or Isometric, two carbon-credit certification bodies, Laguarta said. He added that the projects undergo independent third-party verification as part of the certification process before credits are issued. In addition to Google, Mitti Labs works with customers including carbon marketplace Cool Effect, rice producer Ebro Foods, and agricultural company Syngenta. Laguarta told TechCrunch that the Google agreement is Mitti Labs’ largest offtake deal to date. Mitti Labs currently works with more than 100,000 farmers and aims to have millions of farmers by 2030. The Google deal, Laguarta said, would help the startup move toward that goal by allowing it to expand its projects. A majority of the revenue from the startup’s projects goes to farming communities, Laguarta noted. He declined to disclose how much farmers participating in the Google project would receive, however. While the Google project is limited to India, Mitti Labs plans to launch operations in the Philippines later this year and expand into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027. Laguarta sees room for the market to grow as more companies look to agricultural projects to tackle methane emissions. About 150 million farmers grow rice across India, Southeast Asia, and China, he told TechCrunch. The deal with Mitti Labs is not Google’s first carbon-removal investment in India. In January 2025, the Mountain View, California-headquartered company partnered with Gurugram-based Varaha to buy 100,000 tons of carbon credits. That was Google’s first large-scale purchase of carbon removal credits in the country and the largest involving biomass-produced biochar. Google is also turning to clean-energy projects in India to address its supply-chain emissions. The company has signed an agreement tied to a 150-megawatt solar project in Rajasthan, taking its contracted solar capacity with ReNew in the state to 300 megawatts.
document fetched 2026-09-11 02:59 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/google-signs-its-biggest-rice-methane-carbon-credit-deal-with-indian-startup-mitti-labs