Agritech start-up Arya raises US$ 21 million

Arya an Agritech startup has closed its Series B round and raised US$ 21 million in a mix of equity and debt.

Though multiple lenders participated in providing additional debt financing, Quona Capital, a fintech-focused VC firm, existing investors LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore led the equity round.

From Quona Capital, Mr. Varun Malhotra will join the Board of Arya.

Arya is a full-service provider of digital solutions for storage, processing, financing, and market linkages and serves clients such as farmers, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), financial institutions, SME agri processors, commodity traders and corporate agri businesses.

Through its new funding, Arya plans to expand financing to farmers through its embedded fintech arm Aryadhan and to strengthen its digital post-harvest services and market linkages platform.

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

As per Mr. Prasanna Rao, co-founder and CEO of Arya, India annually produce food grains worth US$ 130 billion produced and there are huge losses in markets due to lack of storage, forcing farmers to sell off-cycle for lower returns. And as these farmers are dependent on financing for their cash flow needs but are vastly underserved, hurting their ability to store and sell their produce optimally.

Mr. Chattanathan Devarajan, Mr. Prasanna Rao, and Mr. Anand Chandra from Arya, are experienced in warehouse receipt financing business in India and were responsible for the agri-finance playbook at ICICI Bank. IndigoEdge was the exclusive advisor on the deal.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.