A leading agritech platform, Arya.ag, has received an agreement worth $19.8 million from the United States International Development Finance Corporation, DFC. This is part of a debt facility that will go into the company’s subsidiary, Aryatech-its agri-commerce wing. This latest financing makes Arya.ag the first agritech startup to head towards two financing rounds this year after raising an equity of $29 million last July.
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This will enable Arya.ag to connect farmers and FPOs with buyers across India, ensuring payment security, better transaction transparency, and access to better markets for agricultural products. According to a press release from Arya.ag, these initiatives are aimed at creating an efficient marketplace for agriculture with less waste and benefit to all parties.
Arya.ag is an online platform connecting sellers and buyers of agricultural products. It offers a complete solution in terms of warehouse discovery, farmgate-level storage, financing, and market linkages. This integrated approach builds trust within the agricultural value chain, making it easier for farmers to sell their products.
It has reached 60% of the districts of India, overseeing more than 11,000 agri-warehouses. It reportedly accumulates and warehouses around a phenomenal $3 billion grain every year. It also allows more than $1.5 billion loan disbursement for the smallholder farmers, FPOs, and the like in the agriculture-related businesses.
Financially, Arya.ag is pretty great. Netting YoY growth of 49.48% in gross revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2023, the revenues came at Rs 290 crore. Profit had moved a great eleven times to Rs 7.58 crore in the same period. Arya.ag had estimated its net revenue to reach Rs 360 crore in FY24, along with a net profit of Rs 17 crore. The company is yet to submit its annual audited report for the previous fiscal year.
In the agritech competitive landscape, DeHaat, Ninjacart, and Bijak exist and are targeting to directly connect farmers to markets and rationalize agricultural trade.
Despite the success of Arya.ag in recent times, the overall agritech sector has not been doing well in raising venture capital for larger funding rounds. The boom in agritech startup fundraising in 2021 and 2022 is now causing several of them to face significant challenges in attracting large investments. Agritech startups have so far raised about $170 million in more than 30 deals in 2024, as per data compiled by TheKredible.
In short, DFC fundings to Arya.ag are one of the significant steps in the success story for this company, and this goes for the whole agritech sector as well. The company focuses on making farmers access markets better and initiate positive improvements within the sector as a whole through ongoing expansion and improvements in their offerings.
