Rize Raises $31 Million
to Scale Low-Emission Rice Across Southeast Asia
A Singapore-based agtech platform is targeting one of agriculture's most stubborn emissions problems — rice cultivation, a climate footprint on par with the entire aviation industry — with a blended equity-and-debt round built for scale.
The Round at a Glance
Rize, a Singapore-headquartered agtech platform focused on decarbonizing rice cultivation, has closed a $31 million Series B round to scale its operations across Southeast Asia. The financing is structured as $20 million in equity, led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts with participation from The Rockefeller Foundation, alongside renewed commitments from existing backers Temasek and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, plus $11 million in debt catalyzed by UOB, Vietnam's BIDV, and Temasek Foundation.
The round lifts Rize's total funding since its late-2022 launch to $47 million, building on a $14 million Series A closed in May 2024. The blended structure — pairing growth equity with development-finance-backed debt — reflects a financing model increasingly favored for agri-climate platforms that need both venture-style scaling capital and lower-cost working capital to fund farmer operations at the field level.
Key Takeaways
- Rize closed a $31M Series B ($20M equity, $11M debt), lifting total funding to $47M since its 2022 launch.
- The company has scaled 10x since its Series A, now working with 17,000 smallholder farmers across 50,000+ hectares in Vietnam and Indonesia.
- Rice cultivation accounts for roughly 12% of global methane emissions — a footprint comparable to the entire aviation industry — on a crop market worth more than $300 billion annually.
- Rize's core intervention is Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), an irrigation technique that cuts methane by periodically draining flooded rice paddies.
- The company targets 300,000 hectares and 150,000 farmers by 2030, alongside a carbon credit business already rated by BeZero Carbon and progressing through Gold Standard certification.
Rice's Outsized Climate Footprint
Rice is the most consumed staple crop on earth and the largest single crop market globally, valued at more than $300 billion annually. It is also disproportionately carbon-intensive: continuously flooded paddies create low-oxygen soil conditions in which methane-producing microorganisms thrive, making rice cultivation responsible for approximately 12% of global methane emissions — a climate impact frequently compared to that of the entire global aviation sector.
Rize's answer is Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), an irrigation method under which fields are periodically drained and reflooded rather than kept continuously submerged. Combined with agronomic training, digital field monitoring, and maximum residue limit (MRL) compliance support, the approach is designed to cut methane emissions and water use while maintaining or improving yields for smallholder farmers — the segment of the supply chain least equipped to absorb the cost of transition on its own.
10x Growth Since Series A
Rize describes its scale-up since the 2024 Series A as a tenfold expansion. The platform now works with nearly 17,000 smallholder farmers across more than 50,000 hectares in Vietnam and Indonesia, supported by a 250-person team spanning technology, agronomy, and field operations. Initial export shipments — 1,500 metric tons of low-emission, fully traceable rice — have already reached buyers in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, giving the company an early commercial proof point beyond the carbon and impact-investing narrative.
The new capital is earmarked for deepening field-to-buyer traceability, scaling AWD adoption and MRL compliance across a larger farmer base, advancing carbon certification, and opening the platform to additional ecosystem partners. Rize's stated ambition is to reach 300,000 hectares and 150,000 smallholder farmers by 2030 — a roughly sixfold expansion from current operations — while extending beyond Vietnam and Indonesia into other Southeast Asian rice-growing markets.
"-This is more than just a funding milestone. It is recognition of the foundation Rize has built and a clear signal that we are ready to create a more connected, resilient, and sustainable food system for smallholder farmers."
A Carbon Business Layered on Top
Beyond farmer income and export revenue, Rize is building a parallel carbon credit business around its verified emissions reductions. The company's rice projects have received an A-equivalent ex-ante rating from carbon ratings agency BeZero Carbon — placing them, by BeZero's own benchmarking, in the top tier of global soil carbon and nature-based solutions ratings — and are progressing through Gold Standard certification, with more than one million credits forecast over the next five years.
That dual revenue model — physical grain exports plus tradable carbon credits generated from the same underlying farming transition — is a structure increasingly common among climate-focused agtech platforms, and one that helps explain the composition of Rize's investor base: a mix of asset managers, philanthropic capital, sovereign-linked investors, and development finance institutions, each with a distinct stake in either the commercial or the climate-impact side of the business.
Relevance to Saudi Arabia and the MENA Region
Rize's operations are currently confined to Vietnam and Indonesia, but the story carries direct relevance for Saudi Arabia's food security architecture. The Kingdom does not cultivate rice domestically — water scarcity rules it out under Vision 2030's shift away from water-intensive agriculture — and instead imports the entirety of its supply, with volumes projected near 1.85 million metric tons for the current marketing year against a domestic market valued at roughly $3.4 billion. That import dependency, part of a wider structure in which the Kingdom sources around 80% of its food from abroad, makes supplier resilience and traceability a standing strategic priority for the General Food Security Authority (GFSA) and major private importers alike.
Verified low-emission, fully traceable rice supply chains — the exact proposition Rize is building — are increasingly relevant to that priority, both as a hedge against climate-driven supply disruption in source markets and as a fit with the Kingdom's own carbon infrastructure. Saudi Arabia's Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC), backed by the Public Investment Fund and Saudi Tadawul Group, has explicitly flagged agriculture as a sector likely to generate and trade credits as the Kingdom builds toward becoming one of the world's largest voluntary carbon markets by 2030. Agri-climate platforms like Rize illustrate the kind of externally generated, internationally certified credits that could eventually flow into that infrastructure or inform how Gulf investors structure their own agri-climate financing.
The financing structure itself is also instructive for the region. Rize's pairing of growth equity with development-finance-backed debt — anchored by sovereign-linked capital in Temasek and Temasek Foundation — mirrors the blended finance approach Gulf sovereign wealth platforms, including Saudi Arabia's SALIC, have used to fund overseas agricultural investment in pursuit of import diversification and food security, rather than pure financial return.
Editorial View
Rize's Series B is a useful marker for where agri-climate investment is heading: away from single-purpose carbon offset projects and toward integrated platforms that combine farmer income, verified export supply chains, and carbon monetization within one operating model. The 10x growth since Series A and the involvement of both commercial asset managers and development finance institutions in the same round suggest investors are treating rice decarbonization as a scalable commercial category, not a philanthropic pilot.
For Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region — structurally dependent on rice imports and simultaneously building out sovereign carbon market infrastructure — the more relevant question is not whether Rize itself enters the region, but whether the model it represents becomes a template regional investors and importers look to replicate or fund directly, either through supply chain partnerships or through the voluntary carbon market platforms the Kingdom is actively scaling.
