Arya Collateral, an Indian Agri-tech startup has secured $21 million in its latest funding round. The Series B funding round was led by Quona Capital and LGT Lightstone Aspada along with another existing investor Omnivore.
Venture Capital firm, Quona Capital invests in fintech companies that are in growth-stage in emerging markets. Multiple unnamed investors also participated in the fresh financing round to provide additional debt financing.
The Noida-based startup provides post-harvest services across the agricultural value chain, including warehousing, warehouse receipt financing, rural storage discovery, collateral management and market linkages.
It’s clients include farmers, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), financial institutions, SME agri processors, commodity traders and corporate agribusinesses. It also offers warehouse receipt financing via Aryadhan, its wholly owned NBFC subsidiary. Aryadhan provides credit to farmers, FPOs and SME aggregators (processors/traders) who have stored agri commodities in the Arya warehouse network.
Based out of Delhi, the company currently manages over 2.5 million MT of agri commodities in its 1400 warehouses, with around 75% of its warehousing capacity located in primary and secondary (village and small mandi level) markets. It is also launching a rural storage discovery platform aiming to build a pan-India agri warehousing marketplace.
Until 2013, Arya was part of the JM Baxi Group. That year, Prasanna Rao and Anand Chandra acquired a controlling stake in the company. Prasanna had previously been the Head of Agri Commodity Finance at ICICI Bank, while Anand was previously ICICI Bank’s National Product Head for Agri Commodity Finance. More recently, they were joined by Chattanathan D, the former Group Product Head of the Rural and Inclusive Banking Group at ICICI Bank.
-AK
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.