Indian agritech leader Arya raises USD 21 million Series B

NEW DELHI, 15 December 2020: Arya, a leader in post-harvest agritech and agri-fintech, today announced the close of its Series B round, having raised USD 21 million in a mix of equity and debt.

The equity round was led by Quona Capital, a venture firm focused on fintech in emerging markets, alongside existing investors LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore. Multiple lenders participated in providing additional debt financing to the company.

The new funding will be used to expand financing to farmers through Arya’s embedded fintech arm, Aryadhan, and to strengthen its digital post-harvest services and market linkages platform, www.a2zgodaam.com.

Building on its market leadership in agricultural warehousing services, Arya has expanded to become a full-service provider of digital solutions for storage, processing, financing, and market linkages. Arya’s clients include farmers, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), financial institutions, SME agri processors, commodity traders and corporate agribusinesses.

Arya helps farmers realize better value for their produce through village level commodity storage, integrated financing, and market linkage services to create better options for commodity sales.

The company’s focus on smallholder farmers, combined with its ubiquitous presence across primary agri-produce markets and utilization of a digital platform with embedded finance, have enabled its rapid scale over the past few years.

“Of the food grains worth USD 130 billion produced by India annually, there are huge losses in primary and secondary markets due to lack of storage, forcing farmers to sell off-cycle for lower returns,” Arya’s Co-Founder and CEO, Prasanna Rao said.

“These same farmers are dependent on financing for their cash flow needs but are vastly underserved, hurting their ability to store and sell their produce optimally. Arya’s digital solution pairs warehousing with financing and critical market linkage services to help smallholder farmers thrive,” Rao added.

“Arya is addressing a vastly underserved market of farmers in India, half of whom previously had little access to post-harvest finance,” Ganesh Rengaswamy, Co-founder and Partner at Quona Capital.

“We believe Arya’s unique approach, providing a full-service digital platform with embedded finance and differentiated efficiencies for small farm holders, will drive the future of farming in India,” As part of the investment, Varun Malhotra, Principal at Quona Capital, will join the Board of Arya.

Arya is led by a team with decades of experience in agri-business and agri-finance sectors. The founders of Arya - Chattanathan Devarajan, Prasanna Rao and Anand Chandra - pioneered the warehouse receipt financing business in India, and were responsible for the agri-finance playbook at ICICI Bank.

Leading investment bank IndigoEdge was the exclusive advisor on the deal.