Startup Deep Dive : Origo Commodities — revenue fell 66% in a year when its biggest client walked away

One government client accounted for more than half of Origo Commodities’ warehousing revenue for over a decade. When that contract quietly lapsed in December 2022, sales at India’s best-known agri-warehousing and trade-finance company fell 66.5%, from ₹1,280.83 crore (roughly $133.4 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in FY23 to ₹425.48 crore in FY24, as per CARE Ratings.

The company had spent 15 years building a pan-India network of leased warehouses, a collateral-management business, and a structured trade-finance arm meant to de-risk it from exactly this kind of single-client exposure. It didn’t work in time. By November 2024, its credit rating had fallen seven notches from where it stood in mid-2022, even as the company insisted, with fresh numbers from the first half of FY25, that the worst was behind it.

Quick facts

What they do

Origo Commodities sells post-harvest infrastructure and financing to the people who move Indian farm produce after it leaves the field: state procurement agencies, traders, processors, exporters, banks and commodity exchanges. It leases and runs warehouses that store paddy, wheat, maize and other bulk crops; it audits and certifies the stock sitting in those warehouses so lenders will finance it (collateral management); and it lends working capital against that same stock through its structured trade-finance and procurement-finance businesses, including a non-banking finance subsidiary, Origo Finance. As per CARE Ratings, the company describes itself as a “multi-model single window supply chain solutions provider” that bridges the gap between farmers and commodity buyers.

The origin

India loses a meaningful share of its harvest every year not in the field but after it, in transit, in storage and in financing gaps between farmer and buyer. That was the founding insight behind Origo, started in 2010 by Mayank Dhanuka and Sunoor Kaul, both IIT Delhi engineering graduates who had gone on to finance careers abroad before returning to build in agriculture. Dhanuka had worked in investment banking and private equity roles across Asia and New York after an MBA at Columbia; Kaul had spent time in operations and finance roles at Bank of America and GE Healthcare after an MBA at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, according to company biography pages. Tracxn and CB Insights also list Jeffrey Hamaoui among the founding team. The pitch was straightforward: if a company could own the warehouse, certify what was inside it, and lend against it, it could turn a fragmented, cash-starved post-harvest chain into something a bank would actually finance.

The struggle years

The idea scaled for a decade, but the last three years were unkind. The clearest marker is the company’s credit rating, which moved from CARE BBB; Stable on 15 June 2022 to CARE BB+; Stable through 2023, then to CARE BB-; Negative on 18 June 2024, and finally to CARE C; Stable by 5 November 2024 — a fall of roughly seven notches in under two and a half years, according to CARE Ratings’ own rating history.

• 15 June 2022 to 7 July 2023: rating steps down from CARE BBB; Stable to CARE BB+; Stable across three successive reviews (CARE Ratings).
• December 2022: its largest single client for warehousing, Punjab State Grains Procurement Corporation Limited (PUNGRAIN), which had accounted for more than half of the warehousing segment’s revenue, does not renew its contract after more than 15 years of association (CARE Ratings).
• FY24 annual report: auditors flag that interest of ₹1.26 crore due on Compulsorily Convertible Debentures in January and March 2024 was not paid on time; the company sought a waiver from investors (CARE Ratings).
• 18 June 2024: rating cut to CARE BB-; Negative, and the short-term rating similarly downgraded (CARE Ratings).
• By March 2024, only ₹24 crore of a planned ₹75-100 crore equity infusion (targeted for April 2024) had actually come in, in the form of compulsorily convertible debentures — a shortfall the rating agency called a “delay in proposed equity infusion” (CARE Ratings).
• 5 November 2024: rating cut again, to CARE C; Stable, where it was subsequently reaffirmed and withdrawn on 8 July 2025 at the company’s own request, with no-objection certificates from its lenders Yes Bank and Catholic Syrian Bank (CARE Ratings).

Underneath the rating actions sat a working-capital squeeze: money owed to Origo by PUNGRAIN, pending since 2012 and still contested, stood at ₹72.59 crore net of provisions as of 31 March 2024, tied up in arbitration proceedings the company had initiated to recover it (CARE Ratings).

The turning point

The single event that reshaped the company’s numbers was the non-renewal of the PUNGRAIN contract in December 2022. PUNGRAIN, the nodal agency the Food Corporation of India uses to manage warehouses in Punjab, had used Origo for warehousing services for more than 15 years and, until FY23, generated over half of the revenue in Origo’s warehousing segment, as per CARE Ratings. Before the contract lapsed, Origo’s FY23 total operating income stood at ₹1,280.83 crore, with a thin operating profit (PBILDT) of ₹2.79 crore. In the twelve months that followed, FY24 total operating income fell to ₹425.48 crore — a 66.47% drop — and operating profit turned negative, at a PBILDT of -₹5.44 crore, while the net loss narrowed only slightly, from ₹24.24 crore to ₹17.45 crore, because a large chunk of the prior year’s loss had come from elsewhere in the business (CARE Ratings). The company has since signed four-to-five-year warehousing agreements with Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan state governments, but CARE Ratings notes the scale of these replacement contracts remains “relatively low compared to PUNGRAIN.”

The money behind it

• October 2018: ₹80 crore (about $10.9 million) in equity from Oikocredit, Triodos Investment Management (via the Hivos-Triodos Fund) and Caspian SME Impact Fund IV, arranged with Unitus Capital as adviser — aimed at scaling financing and logistics capacity across the agri value chain (Inc42; TechStory).
• October 2021: a $20 million debt facility guaranteed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), channelled through a local bank into roughly ₹145 crore of on-ground lending capacity — the company’s most recent large funding event on record (Inc42).
• FY24 (year ended 31 March 2024): ₹24 crore raised via compulsorily convertible debentures, short of a ₹75-100 crore target the company had set for April 2024 (CARE Ratings).
• Plan disclosed as of July 2025: a Series B tranche of about $1.1 million (roughly ₹8.5 crore), plus a further $6-7 million (roughly ₹50-60 crore) targeted for March/April 2025, with existing CCD investors also agreeing in principle to waive unpaid interest and convert early (CARE Ratings).
• Other named backers across databases: Northern Arc, responsAbility Investments, IndusInd Bank, Yes Bank, M2O and Red Forest Capital appear as investors or lenders in CB Insights and PitchBook listings, though the amounts and dates of their individual involvement are not independently confirmed here.
• Cumulative funding: reported as $50.1 million by CB Insights and $52.8 million by Inc42 as of September 2026 — the two trackers disagree by roughly $2.7 million, and no post-money valuation is disclosed in either source.

What each backer changed, on the public record, is narrower than the headline totals suggest: the 2018 impact-investor round funded expansion of financing and logistics reach, the 2021 DFC-backed facility added dollar-denominated debt headroom, and the FY24-25 CCD conversations were less about growth capital than about keeping the balance sheet solvent through a revenue collapse.

How it makes money

Origo earns in three linked ways, and the FY24 numbers show what happens when the balance between them breaks.

• Warehousing and collateral management: fees for storing, inspecting, preserving, testing and certifying commodities held on behalf of government agencies (historically PUNGRAIN, now also Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana bodies) and private clients. CARE Ratings notes this segment used to run at roughly 3% operating profitability, and its slowdown — through lower occupancy and PUNGRAIN’s exit — was the single biggest driver of FY24’s operating loss.
• Structured trade finance / procurement finance: Origo advances working capital against commodities it holds as collateral, on two structures — receivables-backed financing, where goods are already delivered to the buyer and price risk passes to them, and inventory-backed financing, where Origo takes an upfront margin of 20-25% and can issue margin calls if prices fall, similar to a broker’s margin account (CARE Ratings). The margin sits in the spread between what Origo pays to fund this book and what it charges; in FY24, a high interest cost of ₹22.70 crore against shrunken sales squeezed this spread hard.
• Origo Finance (NBFC subsidiary): warehouse receipt finance, procurement finance and MSME lending, run through branches in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra and Karnataka (Inc42/TechStory reporting on the 2018 round). CARE Ratings notes OCIPL had invested ₹48 crore in this subsidiary and lent it a further ₹53.20 crore, meaning the parent’s own financial health is partly hostage to the subsidiary’s.
• The part people get wrong: Origo is often filed under “agritech,” but its P&L behaves like a working-capital lender’s, not a software company’s. Margins depend on interest-rate spreads and collection speed, not user growth — which is why an elongated collection cycle (132 days in FY24, up from 45 days in FY23, per CARE Ratings) hurts it more than a slow quarter of sign-ups would hurt a typical tech startup.

The numbers

Figures below are audited for FY23 and FY24 and unaudited for H1FY25, as disclosed by CARE Ratings in its 8 July 2025 press release. All figures in ₹ crore.

• Overall gearing: 1.33x as of 31 March 2023, improving to 0.65x as of 31 March 2024 (CARE Ratings).
• Adjusted overall gearing (factoring in subsidiary investments, inter-company loans and the disputed PUNGRAIN receivable): a much more leveraged 6.10x as of 31 March 2023, improving to 2.77x as of 31 March 2024, and 2.85x in Q1FY25 (CARE Ratings).
• Interest coverage: 0.09x in FY23, -0.24x in FY24 — meaning operating earnings did not cover interest cost in either year — improving to a still-weak 0.49x in Q1FY25 (CARE Ratings).
• Adjusted tangible net worth: ₹39.03 crore as of 31 March 2024 (CARE Ratings).
• Cash loss: ₹15.69 crore in FY24, turning to a positive gross cash accrual of ₹2.00 crore in H1FY25 (CARE Ratings).
• Free cash balance: ₹5.90 crore as of 30 September 2024, against a debt repayment obligation of ₹13.30 crore for the following six months to March 2025, with working-capital limit utilisation averaging 99% over the preceding six months (CARE Ratings).

Where the money comes from

• Client concentration, historically: PUNGRAIN alone made up more than 50% of warehousing-segment revenue through FY23, before its contract lapsed in December 2022 (CARE Ratings).
• Post-PUNGRAIN diversification: Origo has signed four-to-five-year warehousing contracts with state procurement bodies in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana, though CARE Ratings describes their combined scale as still smaller than PUNGRAIN’s.
• Commodity concentration: the business is weighted toward paddy, wheat, basmati and maize — a deliberate choice because these are easy to liquidate, but one that leaves Origo exposed if any single crop’s price or government policy moves sharply (CARE Ratings).
• Segment mix shift, FY24: management told CARE Ratings it is steering the procurement-finance business toward a “platform model” specifically to reduce debt carried on Origo’s own books, effectively shrinking the balance-sheet-heavy part of the business relative to fee-based warehousing and collateral management.
• Geographic footprint: operations spread on leased warehouses across 17 states, per CARE Ratings’ July 2025 filing, with H1FY25 disclosures describing around 300 leased warehouses with a combined capacity of 33.4 lakh tonnes.
• The surprise: a company built around scale and pan-India reach still had a single-client concentration risk large enough to cut its topline by two-thirds in one year — the diversification the business model was meant to provide arrived only after the shock, not before it.

The risks

• Client-concentration and contract-renewal risk: the PUNGRAIN episode shows the mechanism directly — a single government relationship built over 15-plus years generated over half of a core segment’s revenue, and its non-renewal in December 2022 drove a 66.47% revenue decline the following fiscal year, plus a ₹72.59 crore receivable now stuck in arbitration (CARE Ratings).
• Commodity-price and regulatory risk: as a financier holding paddy, wheat and maize as collateral, Origo is exposed to price swings; its inventory-backed contracts are cushioned by a 20-25% upfront margin and margin calls, but CARE Ratings notes the government can still intervene suddenly through export/import restrictions, hoarding limits or price controls on the same commodities.
• Leveraged, working-capital-heavy balance sheet: adjusted gearing of 2.77x and interest coverage of just 0.49x (Q1FY25), combined with a collection cycle that stretched from 69 days (FY23) to 152 days (FY24), leave thin room for error against near-term debt repayments — CARE Ratings flagged just ₹5.90 crore of free cash against ₹13.30 crore of repayment obligations due within six months as of September 2024.

The takeaway

A company can spend a decade building genuinely hard infrastructure — warehouses, audit systems, financing relationships across a dozen-plus states — and still be brought to its knees by dependence on one counterparty. Origo’s warehousing arm was real, useful and, by its own account, structurally profitable at roughly 3% margins. None of that mattered when the client responsible for over half its segment revenue walked away without warning. The lesson is not that diversification is a nice-to-have; it is that revenue concentration is a solvency risk that compounds through a balance sheet — squeezing occupancy, then margins, then interest coverage, then the credit rating that determines how expensively the next rupee of working capital can be borrowed.

Frequently asked questions

What does Origo Commodities do?

It provides post-harvest infrastructure and financing for Indian agricultural commodities: leased warehousing, collateral management and certification of stored crops, structured trade finance and procurement finance, and MSME lending through its subsidiary Origo Finance.

Who founded Origo Commodities, and when?

Mayank Dhanuka and Sunoor Kaul started the company in 2010 (incorporated in 2011); Tracxn and CB Insights also list Jeffrey Hamaoui as part of the founding team. Dhanuka and Kaul remain the company’s promoters as of its most recent CARE Ratings filing.

Why did Origo Commodities’ revenue fall so sharply in FY24?

Its total operating income fell 66.47%, from ₹1,280.83 crore in FY23 to ₹425.48 crore in FY24, largely because Punjab State Grains Procurement Corporation Limited (PUNGRAIN) — over half of the warehousing segment’s revenue — did not renew its contract after it lapsed in December 2022, and because high interest costs on trade-facilitation lending squeezed margins (CARE Ratings).

How much funding has Origo Commodities raised?

Public trackers put cumulative funding between $50.1 million (CB Insights) and $52.8 million (Inc42) as of September 2026, including a ₹80 crore equity round in October 2018 from Oikocredit, Triodos Investment Management and Caspian SME Impact Fund IV, and a $20 million DFC-guaranteed debt facility in October 2021. No valuation has been publicly disclosed.

Is Origo Commodities profitable or listed?

It remains privately held, with no IPO announced as of September 2026. It posted net losses in both FY23 (₹24.24 crore) and FY24 (₹17.45 crore), though H1FY25 unaudited results showed an operating profit of ₹9.30 crore against a much smaller net loss of ₹1.00 crore, which CARE Ratings characterised as an early-stage turnaround (CARE Ratings).

Sources

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

• CARE Ratings, “Press Release: Origo Commodities India Private Limited,” 8 July 2025
• Inc42, “Agri-Fintech Startup Raises $20 Mn In Debt Funding With DFC Guarantee,” October 2021
• Inc42, “Agritech Company Origo Commodities Raises $10.9 Mn Funding,” October 2018
• TechStory, “Agritech Startup Origo Commodities ₹80 crore Funding from Oikocredit, Triodos, others,” October 2018
• Inc42, “Origo Commodities — Funding & Revenue,” company profile, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, “Origo Commodities — Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations,” accessed September 2026
• PitchBook, “Origo Commodities India: Valuation, Funding & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Origo Commodities — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Origo India, team biography pages for Mayank Dhanuka and Sunoor Kaul, accessed September 2026

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