Devdut Dalal

Carbon Removal is the biggest climate finance & frontier science opportunity for Indian Agriculture over the next decade. But before that becomes a reality, we have to confront India's reputation in the carbon markets-- 17% of all global Carbon Credits between 2009 to 2021. But all, low quality, junk credits (avoidance based, cookstove primarily). A complete lack of transparency/legitimacy, with global clients. Thanks to @ShadmaShaikh for covering the work that @AltCarbonIndia, @MittiLabs & Varaha, have been undertaking in building back trust in India's Carbon Credit project. A high quality Carbon Credit is a charter of science, operations, & community benefits. Our Darjeeling Revival Project is translating the latest Earth Sciences work into real world applications, transforming India's agricultural farms into Carbon sinks. We work with scientists from @iiscbangalore & farmers from Bengal. The good news is-- it works! But to build more trust in the market, we need more independently verified deliveries. In November, @AltCarbonIndia issued Asia's first ever ERW credits audited by @Isometric_HQ. These deliveries are the cornerstone for more Climate Finance to move to the Global South. In fact, for every dollar of funding, suppliers in the Global South have removed 15 times as many tons of CO2 as those in the Global North. That's what success looks like. If we succeed, we not only convert India's 140m farmers into carbon engineers. We show to the world once again that India's frugal science can lead the world. 🇮🇳

One of the most memorable pitches @romitme and I have taken at @LightspeedIndia was when @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta came into our offices a few years ago all covered in dust and mud to pitch @MittiLabs - using hyperspectral data to measure rice farming related methane & CO2 emissions and change farmer practices through scalable remote interventions and farmer ops automation. They both met at @HarvardHBS and decided to move to India to build this important climate change co. Over the last few years they've built the world's most advanced hyperspectral stack for rice, a world class global team from the likes of Agreena, NASA, BlackRock Climate, Ninjacart and more, grown 5-7x on all metrics, have a 10x oversubscribed demand, and some huge upcoming announcements! Glad to partner with @VoyagerVC @Cisco on this one! Link to the full pod in comments:

Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :) Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look. We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more. We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more. Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:

Blog: medium.com/lightspeedindi…

Excited to announce our latest climate investment in @mittilabs -- one of the most complete and highest quality team we've seen globally going after the massive rice decarbonization space: @devdutdalal @XaviLaguarta & Nathan Torbick. The global food system is responsible for ~30+% of annual emissions, of which rice is a huge component. Over 50% of the world’s rice is grown in the asiatic belt. Not only is rice grown in archaic & ancient ways that require huge amounts of water — an increasingly precious resource — the flooded rice-fields block oxygen from penetrating the soil, creating ideal conditions for bacteria that emit methane, a gas that has ~30x higher climate impact than CO2. This is the critical problem Mitti Labs is trying to solve and we are thrilled to announce our investment to support their pioneering approach to transforming rice agriculture through regenerative practices. Also excited to partner with the amazing @sierrap & @sclarsic of @VoyagerVC, @overviewcap, @MarkTercek former CEO of @nature_org and several others in this journey. We've scaled to 40K hectares & 30K farmers in 6mos and looking to 5x next year. Please see our investment thesis in the comment below cc @LightspeedIndia @romitme:

@_pulkitg @MohapatraHemant @MittiLabs @XaviLaguarta Yes indeed!

@MohapatraHemant @MittiLabs @devdutdalal @XaviLaguarta Curious, will this also help reduce the amount of water required?

RT @LightspeedIndia: Did you know that rice farming is one of the major contributors to methane emissions and is at risk due to climate cha…