Indian Agritech Arya Raises $ 21 Mn In Series B Round Led By Quona Capital, Omnivore And LGT Lightstone Aspada The funding will be used to spread out financing to farmers through the platform's embedded fintech arm, Aryadhan, and to reinforce its services and market linkages platform, a2zgodaam.com
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Post-harvest agritech and agri-fintech Arya on Tuesday announced to have raised $21 million in a mix of equity and debt in a Series B funding round led by venture firm Quona Capital along with its 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.
"Of the food grains worth $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," said Prasanna Rao co-founder and chief executive officer, Arya. "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."
The company's clients include farmers, farmer producer organizations (FPOs), financial institutions, SME agri processors, commodity traders, and corporate agribusinesses. The platform claims to help 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.
"Arya is addressing a vastly underserved market of farmers in India, half of whom previously had little access to post-harvest finance," said Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner, 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, Quona Capital, will join the board of Arya. Investment bank IndigoEdge was the exclusive advisor on the deal.
Driving technology through a farmer-centered approach, Arya offers storage, warehouse management, embedded finance, and market linkages to agricultural producers and buyers across India through its digital collaboration platform, a2zgodaam.com. Through its profitable business model with over 2.5 million tones of storage capacity across 1,500 warehouses in 20 Indian states, Arya helps farmers, aggregators, FPOs, food processors and end-user corporate agribusinesses avoid post-harvest losses. It connects the supply side of the agro-ecosystem with the demand side and its NBFC subsidiary, Aryadhan Financial Solutions assists sellers of agri-commodities to avoid distress sale of produce by extending post-harvest credit. It has completed loan disbursements of over INR 250 crore.
