Rize Raises $31 Million to Cut Rice Farming's Methane Footprint in Southeast Asia

Rize has raised $31 million in Series B funding, split between $20 million in equity led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts and $11 million in debt from UOB, BIDV and Temasek Foundation, to scale a sustainable rice farming model across Vietnam, Indonesia and the wider region. The Singapore-based platform aims to expand from its current 50,000 hectares and 17,000 smallholder farmers to more than 300,000 hectares and 150,000 farmers by 2030. The round brings Rize's total funding to $47 million, following a tenfold scale-up since its Series A two years ago.

 

Why Rice Farming Is a Climate Problem at Global Scale

 

Rice cultivation is responsible for approximately 12 percent of global methane emissions, a climate footprint the company equates to the entire aviation industry. That emissions source comes from flooded paddy fields, where standing water creates the oxygen-free conditions in which methane-producing bacteria thrive as organic matter decomposes. Because rice is a staple crop grown by hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across Asia, addressing that footprint cannot be solved through a handful of large industrial interventions; it requires changing how millions of individual farmers actually irrigate their fields.

That is the specific problem Rize's technology and farmer network are built to solve. The company promotes Alternate Wetting and Drying, an irrigation method endorsed by the International Rice Research Institute and CGIAR, which allows fields to dry out periodically between flooding cycles rather than remaining continuously submerged. According to Rize, the practice reduces methane emissions by up to 50 percent and cuts water consumption by 20 to 30 percent, while increasing farmer income by up to 30 percent without reducing yield, a combination that matters because farming practices that cut emissions but also cut farmer income or yield tend to fail at scale, since farmers cannot be expected to adopt practices that damage their own livelihoods.

 

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Independent Verification Behind the Emissions Claims

 

What distinguishes Rize's claims from unverified sustainability marketing is third-party carbon credit assessment. The company's Sustainable Rice Production project has received a BeZero Carbon ex ante rating of A.pre with low project execution risk, indicating a high likelihood that credits eventually issued will achieve their claimed emissions avoidance or removal. BeZero's benchmarking places an equivalent A rating within the top 30 percent of soil carbon and agriculture projects globally and the top 11 percent of nature-based solutions projects, a meaningful distinction in a carbon credit market that has faced sustained criticism over projects whose claimed reductions did not materialise as promised.

The project is also progressing through Gold Standard certification, a widely respected carbon credit verification body, with more than 1 million credits forecast over the next five years. Combined with full field-level traceability for its low-emission rice, that verification infrastructure is what allows Rize to sell into export markets willing to pay for genuinely certified low-emission commodities rather than relying on unaudited sustainability claims.

 

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From Field Practice to Export Market

 

Rize has already shipped 1,500 metric tons of low-emission rice to buyers in Europe, Canada, Australia and Singapore, markets that increasingly require compliance with Maximum Residue Limit standards governing pesticide and chemical residues alongside emissions credentials. Meeting both requirements simultaneously, verified low emissions and export-grade safety compliance, is what positions Rize's rice to command access to premium markets rather than competing purely on commodity pricing, and the new funding will explicitly fund deepening field-to-buyer traceability and expanding market linkages to capture that export demand without requiring price premiums from buyers.

The investor coalition itself reflects the deal's positioning at the intersection of agricultural development and climate finance. BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts framed the investment as reflecting conviction that capital deployed into high-impact platforms in underserved markets can deliver measurable environmental outcomes, while The Rockefeller Foundation's Slav Gatchev pointed to the resource management, financing access and market access challenges facing smallholder farmers as the underlying problem Rize's technology-enabled approach is designed to solve.

Whether Rize can scale from its current 50,000 hectares to the targeted 300,000 by 2030 while maintaining the rigour of its carbon verification and export compliance standards will determine whether this funding round marks a genuine inflection point in reducing rice's global methane footprint or remains a promising but geographically limited model.

 

Source: Rize