ARIA, a one-stop solution for Indonesia’s agriculture service, said Monday it has secured $5 million of 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 said in a statement.

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

ARIA will also 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 and Chief Executive Officer of ARIA.

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.

It 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 its potential agricultural farmland in Indonesia.

Along with this funding, ARIA also launched its first application, ARIA TANI, as a one-stop business to consumer (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 is also developing the IoT by creating worker tracker and drone sprayer technology. This system primarily focuses on increasing the visibility and network connectivity in harsh field conditions of large-scale agriculture farming. The combination of worker tracker innovation and drone sprayer could increase working efficiency, especially in time and farm resources in spraying, fertilizing, and harvesting time.

“With the development of IoT systems in the agricultural field, ARIA created a solution to increase the visibility in harsh field conditions with worker trackers that ensure working time efficiency, and drone sprayer technology that provides mechanic fertilizing service,

“As a result, farmers received accurate data analysis from their field and the exact amount of fertilizer in the covered area, as well as increased efficiency of fertilizer usage in the field,” said Arden Lim, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of ARIA.

Within months of concentrated deployment, Aria has secured exclusive drone spraying rights in the country for Bayer Agrochemicals, cementing trust from consistent quality and dedication to service leveraged and supported by ARIA’s 17 service branches across the country.

It has also secured a Forestry mapping contract with APP for 300,000 Hectares of QC Weeding, achieving best-in-class results amongst its peers and cementing excellence with 97 percent image quality and acceptance, setting a new standard for the task at hand.

“We are excited to double down our investment in ARIA. We have experienced positive progress made by ARIA in providing better-digitalized solutions for the farmers in Indonesia,

“With the big potential of agriculture in Indonesia, we believe ARIA will serve as the right solution in integrating the digital and agriculture solution to empower more farmers in Indonesia,” said Melisa Irene, Partner of East Ventures.

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