Startup Deep Dive : Arya.ag — how a warehouse operator built a profitable lending business on stored grain

Arya.ag moves more than ₹11,000 crore ($1.15 billion at ₹96 to the dollar) of farmer credit through Indian warehouses every year, and it does so with a bad-loan rate under 0.5 percent — a number most agri-lenders in India would not believe if you told them, because lending against a farmer’s stored wheat or soyabean is supposed to be one of the riskiest things a lender can do.

The company that makes this work is not a bank. It is a Noida-headquartered warehousing operator that turned itself into a lender, then into a marketplace, and only after three fiscal years of profit is it now talking about an IPO. Along the way it survived a loss-making stretch, rebuilt its own business model from scratch once, and is now navigating a global crop-price slump that its own leadership admits is squeezing the sector it serves.

Quick facts

What they do

Arya.ag runs a post-harvest platform for Indian farmers, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), traders and agribusinesses. It leases and operates a network of roughly 12,000 warehouses reaching about 60 percent of India’s districts, where farmers can store grain instead of selling it immediately after harvest when prices are typically at their lowest, as reported by TechCrunch in January 2026. Once the grain is stored, the same farmer can borrow against it through Arya’s own non-banking finance company, Aryadhan, or through partner banks, and can eventually sell it through Arya’s Aryatech marketplace to processors, traders and corporate buyers. The company says it serves between 850,000 and 900,000 farmers, per TechCrunch, and aggregates close to $3 billion worth of grain a year, roughly 3 percent of India’s total agricultural output by the same account.

The origin

Prasanna Rao grew up in Odisha watching harvests rot for lack of storage and farmers forced to sell into gluts right after harvest, a memory he has cited as shaping his later work, according to Inc42’s account of the company’s history. He went on to work in ICICI Bank’s commodity-financing division alongside Anand Chandra and Chattanathan Devarajan, and the three of them saw the same problem from the lender’s side of the table: a bank’s rigid credit rules and its distance from village-level markets meant it could never really underwrite a smallholder farmer, no matter how good the collateral. In 2013 the trio left ICICI and, using personal savings and money raised from friends and family, bought a small existing collateral-management business called Arya Collateral, then operating under the JM Baxi Group, per Inc42 and YourStory. Their insight was narrow but, in Indian agri-finance, it turned out to matter: a neutral party that actually controlled the warehouse could turn stored grain into bankable collateral, and could do it at a scale and in places no bank branch would ever reach.

The struggle years

The idea did not work in its first form. For its early years Arya Collateral managed warehouses on behalf of banks, acting purely as a third-party collateral manager rather than an operator with skin in the game. That structure kept Arya at arm’s length from the actual state of the grain and the farmers who owned it, and by 2015 Rao and Chandra concluded it would not scale: the company pivoted to leasing and directly operating its own warehouses instead of managing other people’s facilities, a change Inc42 describes as necessary for the company to get real operational visibility into how post-harvest storage and farmer distress actually worked. The pivot cost time and capital before it paid off in better underwriting and lower customer-acquisition costs, since farmers who stored grain with Arya converted naturally into borrowers.

The company’s financials show a second, more recent struggle. After growing for years, Arya posted its only consolidated loss in FY21, according to Inc42’s financial summary, and followed it with a near-breakeven FY22, in which revenue from operations reached ₹194 crore but the company still closed the year roughly ₹10 lakh in the red, as per Entrackr’s reporting on the FY23 results. Two fiscal years of losses or near-losses, arriving just as global commodity markets were disrupted through 2020 and 2021, is not a comfortable position for a company whose core business is lending against the value of stored crops.

The turning point

The moment that changed the trajectory was not a funding round. It was a licence. In 2018, Arya’s finance arm, Aryadhan Financial Solutions, secured a non-deposit-taking NBFC licence from the Reserve Bank of India, letting the group lend directly against stored grain instead of only routing farmers to partner banks, per Inc42’s account of the company’s history. That integration — warehouse and lender under one roof, the same platform that stored the grain also underwriting the loan against it — is what let Arya offer credit at roughly 13 percent interest, against the 16 to 25 percent a farmer might otherwise pay non-bank lenders, and to disburse it, per the company’s own claims reported by TechCrunch, in under five minutes with a fully digital process. That single structural change is the reason the company could later report FY24 revenue of ₹340 crore rising to ₹447 crore in FY25 with profit climbing each year, rather than staying a flat-margin warehousing operator.

The money behind it

Arya.ag has raised capital across several rounds since 2016, mixing equity and, in later rounds, blended debt facilities. Based on the amounts individually reported by YourStory, Business Today, Business Standard and Entrackr across these rounds, the company’s disclosed fundraising totals roughly $185–200 million to date, a figure broadly consistent with Inc42’s own total-funding estimate of about $200 million.

• 2016 — seed: $2.4 million from Aspada Investment Company, its first institutional cheque.
• March 2020 — pre-Series B: $6 million led by Omnivore, with existing investor LGT Lightstone Aspada participating, as per YourStory.
• December 2020 — Series B: $21 million led by Quona Capital, with LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore returning, as per YourStory.
• January 2022 — Series C: $60 million in a mixed equity-and-debt round; the roughly $46 million equity portion was led by Asia Impact SA with Lightrock India and Quona Capital returning, and about $10 million of the debt component came from the US International Development Finance Corporation, taking the post-round valuation past $300 million, as per Business Standard and Business Today.
• July 2024: ₹242.36 crore (about $29.2 million) from Asia Impact and Quona Capital, structured as compulsory convertible preference shares, at a post-allotment valuation of about ₹2,700 crore ($325 million), as per Entrackr.
• January 2026 — Series D: ₹725 crore (about $80.3–81 million) in an all-equity round led by GEF Capital Partners, more than 70 percent of it primary capital and the rest secondary sales to existing investors, as per Entrackr and TechCrunch. Neither source discloses a post-money valuation for this round.

What each backer changed: Omnivore and Aspada backed the company while it was still a warehousing-only business and before Aryadhan existed; Quona Capital, a fintech-focused fund, joined at Series B just as the lending arm was being built out and has stayed in through Series C and the 2024 round; and GEF Capital Partners, a climate-and-sustainability-focused investor, is the first backer to lead a round after the company had already turned durably profitable, which is itself a signal about how the story had changed by 2026.

How it makes money

Arya.ag earns from three linked activities rather than one, and each layer feeds the next.

• Storage and warehousing fees: farmers, FPOs and agribusinesses pay to store grain in Arya-leased warehouses; in FY24 this was the largest single line, at ₹212.8 crore or 62.6 percent of operating revenue, up 7.5 percent year-on-year, as per Entrackr.
• Interest income on commodity-backed loans: through Aryadhan, Arya lends against the stored grain at ticket sizes from ₹1 lakh to ₹2 crore at roughly 13 percent interest; interest income rose 27.2 percent to ₹55.4 crore in FY24 and stayed at a similar ₹55.4 crore in FY25, as per Entrackr.
• Marketplace commission on Aryatech: Arya connects the same stored commodities to buyers and takes a fee on the transaction; its take rate rose from about 3.4 percent in FY24 to about 3.8 percent in FY25, as per Entrackr’s FY25 report, on gross commodity volumes running into thousands of crore.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong, according to Inc42’s framing, is treating the lending business as the product and the warehouses as mere support for it. In practice the ownership of the physical storage network is the moat: it is what gives Arya real-time knowledge of exactly how much grain of what quality sits where, which is what makes the loan safely underwritable in the first place, and it is what keeps customer-acquisition cost low because the farmer is already inside the system before they ever apply for credit.

The numbers

Arya.ag’s revenue and profit over the four most recent fiscal years it has reported, compiled from Entrackr’s year-by-year filings-based coverage:

• FY24 total expenses: ₹330.4 crore, up 16% YoY, against ₹352 crore total income including non-operating items, as per Entrackr.
• FY25 profit before tax: ₹43 crore, up 95% YoY, ahead of the roughly 70% rise in profit after tax, as per Entrackr.
• H1 FY26 (April–September 2025): revenue of about ₹3,000 crore-equivalent scale activity with net revenue near ₹300 crore (~$33.3 million), up about 30% YoY, and profit after tax already up 39% for the half, as per TechCrunch, January 2026.
• Return on capital employed (FY24): 14.87%, with an EBITDA margin of 25.3%, as per Entrackr.

Where the money comes from

Arya’s own filings-based numbers show a business that is overwhelmingly a storage-and-credit operation dressed up, in headlines, as a “grain commerce” platform.

• Storage and warehousing: 62.6% of FY24 operating revenue (₹212.8 crore), the single largest and steadiest line, per Entrackr.
• Financing (interest income): ₹55.4 crore in both FY24 and FY25, a smaller share of revenue than storage but the segment company leadership credits with pulling farmers deeper into the platform, per Entrackr and Inc42.
• Marketplace/commerce (Aryatech): thin take rate of 3.4–3.8% but running over very large volumes — Arya’s NBFC book alone crossed ₹2,000 crore in commodity-backed lending in FY25, and partner banks separately disbursed more than ₹10,000 crore against Arya-issued warehouse receipts the same year, as per Business Standard.
• Geography: operations span roughly 60% of India’s districts through the leased warehouse network, concentrated in primary and secondary (village and small-mandi level) markets rather than large urban mandis, as reported by TechCrunch and earlier reporting cited by Focus AgriTech.
• The surprise: the highest-volume part of the business, marketplace commerce, is also the lowest-margin part; it is storage rental income, the least “fintech” sounding line on the balance sheet, that still does most of the heavy lifting for FY24 revenue.

The risks

• Commodity price risk: Arya’s lending is collateralised by stored grain whose value moves with global crop prices; TechCrunch reported in January 2026 that falling global crop prices were pressuring the wider agritech sector even as Arya’s own bad-loan ratio stayed under 0.5%, meaning a sharper or more sustained price fall would test loan-to-value assumptions the company has not yet had to stress in a genuine downturn.
• Execution risk in an asset-light network: the roughly 12,000 warehouses in Arya’s network are leased, not owned, per TechCrunch and Inc42; that keeps the model capital-light but means quality control, receipt integrity and physical security depend on thousands of individually contracted sites rather than a smaller set of owned facilities, a structural exposure inherent to the collateral-management model the company itself was built to fix for banks.
• Credit risk concentrated in smallholder income: Aryadhan’s loan book, and the roughly ₹2,000 crore it disbursed on its own balance sheet in FY25 per Business Standard, is ultimately lent against the income of farmers and FPOs whose cash flow is seasonal and weather-dependent; the sub-0.5% gross NPA ratio the company reports is strong today but has not been tested through a multi-year agrarian downturn since the NBFC licence was granted in 2018.

The takeaway

The lesson in Arya.ag’s climb from a small collateral-management shop to a company reportedly eyeing an IPO within two years is not that agri-fintech is a good idea — dozens of funded Indian startups have tried versions of it and struggled. It is that the founders changed the sequence: instead of building a lending product and then trying to find collateral to lend against, they first spent years becoming the party that physically controlled the collateral, and only then turned on the lending tap. Revenue and profit only really compounded after 2018, five years after founding, once the warehouse network and the NBFC licence existed together rather than separately. For any founder building a fintech product on top of a real-world asset, the order in which you acquire trust in that asset — before or after you start lending against it — may matter more than how fast you scale the lending itself.

Frequently asked questions

What is Arya.ag and who founded it?

Arya.ag is the trading name of Arya Collateral Warehousing Services Private Limited, a Noida-based post-harvest agri-platform founded in 2013 by former ICICI Bank executives Prasanna Rao, Anand Chandra and Chattanathan Devarajan, who acquired an existing collateral-management business and built warehousing, lending and marketplace services on top of it, as per Inc42 and YourStory.

How much funding has Arya.ag raised?

Across disclosed rounds from a 2016 seed cheque through a January 2026 Series D, Arya.ag’s individually reported round sizes add up to roughly $185–200 million, consistent with Inc42’s own estimate of about $200 million in total funding; its last publicly reported valuation was about $325 million (₹2,700 crore) in July 2024, as per Entrackr and Indian Startup Times.

Is Arya.ag profitable?

Yes, on a standalone-filings basis. After a loss in FY21 and a near-breakeven FY22 (revenue ₹194 crore, loss of about ₹10 lakh), the company reported profit after tax of ₹7.6 crore in FY23, ₹19 crore in FY24, and roughly ₹32 crore in FY25 on net revenue of ₹447 crore, as per Entrackr’s year-by-year reporting.

How does Arya.ag make money?

It earns primarily from warehousing and storage fees (about 63% of FY24 operating revenue), interest income on commodity-backed loans made through its NBFC arm Aryadhan, and commission income from its Aryatech marketplace, which connects farmers to buyers on a take rate of roughly 3.4–3.8%, as per Entrackr.

Is Arya.ag planning an IPO?

Founder and CEO Prasanna Rao told TechCrunch in January 2026 that the company was aiming to be IPO-ready within 18 to 20 months of that report; this is a company-stated target rather than a confirmed listing, and no exchange or date has been disclosed.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “Even as global crop prices fall, India’s Arya.ag is attracting investors — and staying profitable”, January 2026
• Inc42, “How Arya.ag Made Agri Credit Profitable By Owning The Post-Harvest Layer”, 2026
• Entrackr, “Arya.ag near Rs 300 Cr revenue in FY23; turns profitable”, November 2023
• Entrackr, “Arya.ag reports Rs 340 Cr revenue in FY24, profit surges 2.5X”, 2024
• Entrackr, “Arya.ag reports Rs 447 Cr revenue in FY25; profits spike 70%”, 2025
• Entrackr, “Agritech startup Arya.ag raises $29 Mn at valuation of $325 Mn”, July 2024
• Entrackr, “Agritech firm Arya.ag raises over $80 Mn in Series D from GEF Capital”, January 2026
• Business Standard, “Arya.ag’s valuation crosses $300 million after Series C round”, January 2022
• Business Today, “Agritech platform Arya.ag raises $60 million in Series C”, January 2022
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Agritech startup Arya.Ag raises $60M in Series C”, January 2022
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Arya raises $6M pre-Series B round from Omnivore, LGT Lightstone Aspada”, March 2020
• Business Standard, “Arya.ag NBFC arm does Rs 2,000 crore commodity financing in FY25”, 2025
• Indian Startup Times, “Arya.ag Secures $29 Million Funding, Reaches $325 Million Valuation”, 2024

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