Agritech startup Arya raises $21 million

CHENNAI: Agritech startup Arya has closed its Series B round, raising $21 million in a mix of equity and debt.
The equity round was led by Quona Capital, a fintech-focused VC firm, along with existing investors LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore. Multiple lenders participated in providing additional debt financing, the startup said.
As part of the investment, Varun Malhotra, principal at Quona Capital, will join the Board of Arya.
Arya plans to use the new funding to expand financing to farmers through its embedded fintech arm Aryadhan and to strengthen its digital post-harvest services and market linkages platform.
Arya is 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 agri businesses.
Arya helps farmers realise better value for their produce through village-level commodity storage, integrated financing and market linkage services to create better options for commodity sales.
“Of the food grains worth US$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," he added.
The founders of Arya - Chattanathan Devarajan, Prasanna Rao and Anand Chandra - have experience in 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.