Agritech startup ARIA secures $5m to help Indonesian farmers

ARIA, a one-stop solution for Indonesia’s agriculture service, announced raising $5 million in seed funding led by East Ventures, who joined the pre-seed round in March 2022. This round of funding was also joined by Triputra Group, Michael Sampoerna, Arkana Ventures, GK-Plug & Play, and other strategic investors.

ARIA is an agritech firm with the purpose of increasing efficiency, productivity, and crop output via drones and IoT solutions, as well as providing preventive and predictive agricultural solutions for large-scale farmers and plantations.

The startup manifests this commitment and trust through the funding to keep developing and expanding the network infrastructure and quickly establish distribution points in 17 branches throughout the country to tackle ARIA’s potential agricultural farmland in Indonesia.

This expansion will be accompanied by purchasing an expanded drone fleet, developing key IoT asset tracking technologies, and bringing value and impactful change to ARIA customers.

ARIA will allocate the funding to continue helping the farmers to build a mechanized agricultural system within drone culture with specific targets for Indonesian farmers, ensuring the right development of product design, IoT development, and drone systems for better agriculture progress in Indonesia.

“We are glad to receive this new fund, following the previous round earlier this year. This investment serves as a strong testament to our strong belief in empowering the agriculture sector through the usage of digital solutions. We believe that our solutions will unlock the biggest potential of agriculture in Indonesia and create more positive impacts to the country’s overall growth,” said William Sjaichudin, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ARIA.

Along with this funding, ARIA also launched its first application, ARIA TANI, as a one-stop B2C solution for integrated agriculture services. It also expanded IoT technology and connectivity to increase agricultural productivity in Indonesia in large-scale plantations.

The application offers the solutions of drones as a service and other products such as fertilizer, chemicals, and other farming tools. ARIA TANI allows farmers to obtain drone service and farm products on time and exact amount through one integrated app.

ARIA was founded by William Sjaichudin (Co-Founder and CEO), Arden Lim (Co-Founder and CPO), and Yosa Rosario (Co-Founder and COO) in October 2021. These co-founders realized that one of the biggest problems that in Indonesia’s agriculture sector is the alarming rate of decreasing farmers.

It has resulted in difficulties obtaining manpower for such activities as spraying and harvesting. Therefore, it has resulted in a reduced quality of crops and higher chances of a failed harvest which results in more losses to the farmer.