04 November 2026, Paris, FR: CarbonFarm, an agricultural technology company that measures and helps reduce climate emissions from rice farming, has raised 7 million euros in a new funding round to expand its satellite monitoring system into more countries. The Series A round was oversubscribed, meaning investor demand exceeded the amount the company set out to raise. Colam Impact led the round, with new money from Proparco, Suma Capital, elea, Working Capital Fund, Albo and Bpifrance, alongside continued backing from earlier investors Serena, makesense and Techmind.
Rice is one of the largest single sources of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Flooded paddies create oxygen-poor soil conditions that let certain bacteria produce methane, a gas that traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over the short term, though it also breaks down faster. According to CarbonFarm, rice cultivation accounts for roughly 12 percent of human-caused methane emissions worldwide and uses up to 28 percent of the freshwater applied to crops globally, making it a priority target for both climate and water-efficiency programs.
How the monitoring works
CarbonFarm’s platform combines satellite imagery, analyzed with artificial intelligence, with on-the-ground field data and greenhouse gas modeling to estimate emissions farm by farm rather than relying on broad regional averages. That level of detail is meant to confirm whether an individual farm has actually changed its water management, rather than simply assuming a whole district has adopted a new practice because some farms within it have.
This matters because the output feeds directly into carbon credits, tradable certificates that represent a verified reduction in emissions, which companies in other industries can buy to offset part of their own carbon footprint. Carbon markets, both the voluntary market and compliance schemes tied to government regulation, have faced growing criticism in recent years over credits that claimed emissions cuts without solid, farm-level proof. Buyers, particularly large food, beverage and consumer goods companies under pressure to report and cut emissions across their supply chains (a category known as Scope 3 emissions, covering everything a company does not own or control directly), have been pushing suppliers of carbon credits for exactly the kind of granular measurement, reporting and verification, known in the industry as MRV, that CarbonFarm is built around.
According to the company, changing how long paddies stay flooded, rather than keeping them continuously submerged through the growing season, can cut methane emissions by as much as 50 percent and reduce water use by 30 percent without lowering yields. CarbonFarm says it does not simply hand farmers a monitoring report and leave them to find a buyer. The company works with rice producers, cooperatives, agribusinesses, non-profit groups, government agencies and local project developers on the full chain of activity needed to turn a change in farming practice into a sellable credit: structuring the project, arranging financing, handling third-party certification and introducing producers to buyers.
Since its previous funding round, CarbonFarm has expanded its operations to 19 countries. Co-founder and chief executive Vassily Carantino said the company’s approach to growth is built around supporting the cooperatives, agribusinesses and local organizations that already work with rice farmers, rather than trying to replace them. “Scale will not come from replacing local value-chain players, it will come from equipping them,” Carantino said. Co-founder and chief technology officer James Hastwell has said that transparent, scientifically measured results are what give carbon credit buyers the confidence to pay premium prices for higher-quality credits, as opposed to cheaper, less rigorously verified alternatives elsewhere in the market.
CarbonFarm intends to use the new capital to deepen its presence across Asia, Africa and Europe, accelerate its push into Latin America, and continue developing both its monitoring technology and its project development and financing capabilities. For a company whose core product is essentially trust, proof that a claimed emissions reduction actually happened on a specific field, that expansion depends on being able to replicate its field-level verification model across very different rice-growing regions, from smallholder plots in South and Southeast Asia to larger commercial operations in Latin America, each with different water infrastructure, land tenure and farmer organization.
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