Agritech firm Arya partners with Canara Bank to offer farm loans

Post harvest services-focused agritech firm Arya has partnered with Canara Bank to help farmers access financial services for collateral management and warehousing requirements.

The partnership, a statement said, aims to support and extend financial services to farmers, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), processors and depositors stocking their agri-produce in warehouses managed by Arya across India.

“Our goal has always been to create an integrated platform that offers everything in an agriculture supply chain. But rural lending has been one big obstacle for us as an industry and through this partnership, we will be able to give zero paperwork, instant credits, robust solutions, and much more to our farmers, FPOs, processors and depositors,” Prasanna Rao, co-founder and CEO of Arya, said.

Canara Bank will have access to over 3,50,000 farmers via Arya’s network of 450 FPOs to meet its priority sector lending targets, the statement said. As a collateral manager, Arya will facilitate post-harvest credit for the bank through its digital platform across its network of 4,000 warehouses covering more than 3 million tonnes of agriculture commodities, especially in primary and secondary near-farm markets.

Founded in 1982 as part of the JM Baxi group, Arya was hived off as a separate company after former ICICI Bank executives Prasanna Rao and Anand Chandra acquired controlling stake in the company. In 2019, the firm onboarded former group product head of ICICI Bank’s rural and inclusive banking group, Chattanathan D, as a co-promoter.

Arya focuses on integrated post-harvest services. It works with farmers, FPOs, financial institutions, small and medium agri processors, commodity traders and corporate agribusinesses to help farmers with village level commodity storage, financing services and market linkage.

Through a tech-enabled back-end ecosystem, the platform offers ancillary services such as warehouse management, access to finance, quality testing, storage protection services, and connecting produce to buyers. It claims to have over 2.5 million tonnes of storage capacity across 1,500 warehouses in 20 Indian states and completed loan disbursements of over Rs 250 crores.

In its most recent fundraising round, Arya secured $21 million in a mixed equity and debt transaction.