Building Arya.ag as India’s largest and only profitable grain commerce platform

In ten days, I complete five years at Arya.ag.
Half a decade of learning, unlearning and growing up into a communications leader.

When I joined, the company was at a crossroads.

The founders were brilliant, deeply execution-driven men, but under intense investor pressure. They were shy by nature, uninterested in self-promotion, and focused entirely on outcomes.
But the market was changing.
A company powering India’s largest grain commerce network couldn’t stay invisible anymore.

And there I was, mid-Covid, having already said “no” to a role I should’ve taken…
Terrified that another “no” would jinx my career.
So I said “yes” to this one.
With a one-line brief: “We need to build visibility for Arya.”

On paper, it sounded like standard PR work. But anyone in communications knows, visibility is never just visibility. It’s culture. It’s clarity. It’s leadership alignment.
It’s stitching together a story when every team is pulling in a different direction.

Pretty quickly, I realised that this wasn’t just a PR mandate.
This was a rebuild-the-entire-narrative mandate.
For our founders. For our investors. For the market.
And most importantly, for ourselves.

That journey is what turned me into the leader I am today.
And it gave me a playbook I didn’t know I was building until much later.

I’m breaking that playbook down into five Powers: the five forces that shaped our visibility, our brand, and my leadership.
1️⃣ The Power of Perspective: How three verticals, three promoters, and three stories became one ecosystem narrative that our stakeholders could finally understand and believe in.

2️⃣ The Power of Purpose: How shifting teams from “what I do” to “what this does for the world” changed our entire communication strategy..

3️⃣ The Power of People: Because comms doesn’t work without human alignment: founders, CXOs, field teams, and a comms team that built the muscle together.

4️⃣ The Power of Possibility: How telling the right stories helped the world see what Arya was truly building, far beyond warehousing.

5️⃣ The Power of Persistence: The discipline every communicator understands:
Showing up, message after message, story after story, until the brand becomes undeniable.

Not mere communications principles, these are leadership principles.
They shaped how a company with a warehouse legacy became India’s largest and only profitable agritech company, with a story strong enough to match its ambition.

And they shaped me.

The Power of Perspective

When I first joined Arya, the work on the ground was extraordinary — but the story wasn’t.

We had three strong verticals: Storage, Finance, and Commerce.
Each led by one promoter. Each vertical with its own rhythm, its own language, its own identity.

On paper, it looked organised.
On the ground, it looked like three companies meeting the same client with three different narratives.
And the investors felt that, too. When a story is fragmented, confidence gets fragmented.

That’s when it became clear:
The whole had to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Not Arya Collateral, the storage company.
Not Aryadhan, the NBFC.
Not Aryatech, the commerce platform.

One brand. One ecosystem. One promise. One purpose.

And that’s how Arya became Arya.ag: not a collection of verticals, but India’s largest integrated grain commerce network.

This wasn’t a cosmetic brand shift.
It changed how the founders introduced themselves. It changed how investors perceived the business model. It changed how teams collaborated internally.
And it changed how the market understood us.

Perspective is a communications superpower.
It takes courage for leadership to stop defending their silos and start telling one story. But once they do, everything becomes clearer.

I’m grateful that our founders and leadership trusted us with that alignment.
They didn’t just understand the value of one story.
They backed it. They lived it. They led with it.

The Power of Purpose

Once the story became one, the next question was:
Do people feel connected to it?

Because inside most organisations, work can easily feel like a list of tasks, routines, workflows, and checklists. Dull and mundane.
But the moment you shift employees from
“what I do” → “what this does for the world,”
EVERYTHING changes.

Yes, someone is checking grain at the farmgate.
Yes, someone is processing a loan or chasing paperwork.
Yes, someone is ensuring a financial transaction happens faster than India has ever seen.
Yes, someone is bringing storage closer to a farmer’s home.
But the real outcome?
CHOICE
A farmer gets to choose when to sell, whom to sell to, and at what price.

That one idea of “choice” became the purpose that fuelled us.

It energised teams through heat waves, monsoons, price shocks, and agricultural uncertainties.
It turned “tasks” into “impact”.
It turned “jobs” into “agency”.

PURPOSE is the fuel of communications.
When people understand the meaning of their work, they speak differently, show up differently, and carry the story differently.
And that’s what great communication does:
It helps people see their own impact!

The Power of People

A communications strategy is only as strong as the people bringing it to life.
And I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with a team that made building Arya.ag’s communications playbook feel less like work and more like co-creation.
Each person brought something different: instinct, curiosity, structure, storytelling flair, deep field understanding.
But they all carried the same fire.

Together, we built unified leadership messaging so every vertical finally showed up with one voice.
We shaped founder and CXO communication playbooks that allowed each leader’s strengths to shine without scattering the narrative.

We shifted our external footprint from transactional updates to real storytelling:
• farmer narratives
• partner collaborations
• sustainability impact
• product innovation
• financial inclusion
• field realities and tech journeys

Press stories gained depth.
LinkedIn became a thought-leadership engine.
YouTube reflected real-world transformation.
Everything stitched together with intention.

Because people are and always will be the first storytellers of any brand.
And when your people believe the story, the world follows.

Power of Possibility

Five years ago, when the world looked at Arya, they saw a warehousing company.

What they didn’t see was everything happening behind the scenes: the NBFC, the digital commerce engine, the innovations happening quietly at the farmgate.
I walked in with a clean slate.
From that point, everything was #possibility.

Our Knowledge Management team had already pioneered extraordinary work; partnering with UNDP, Tata Trusts, Mahila Arthik Vikas Mahamandal (MAVIM) and others to bring learning, technology, and agency to the farmer’s doorstep.

But none of this was visible.

So we began telling those stories, one possibility at a time.
Each story became a tiny piece in a much larger structure:
• tech-for-farmer impact
• climate resilience
• collaborations
• sustainability wins
• everyday innovation
• field heroes
• financial inclusion

Five years later, the big problems are still big and real: climate uncertainty, uneven access to technology, fragmented farms…
But day after day, our teams at Arya.ag build one more piece on the possibility stack:
A loan sanctioned in five minutes.
A Smart Farm Centre saving a harvest.
A young CVRP teaching her village how to read weather data.

Possibility keeps organisations moving when progress feels slow.
And #communications?
It shows people what’s possible so they begin to BELIEVE in it: inside and outside the organisation.

And that’s why the Power of Possibility is #4 on my communication playbook.

Power of Persistence

And finally, the most important of my powers: The Power of PERSISTENCE.

If you’ve ever worked on a jigsaw puzzle, you know the thrill isn’t in finishing.
It’s in knowing the direction, placing one small piece at a time, even when the picture looks nothing like the final image.
Building a brand is exactly like that.
Except here, the pieces keep moving.
The picture keeps changing. The table keeps shaking.

The only constant is the direction you’re committed to.

For me, that north star was simple:
Help build India’s largest and only profitable agritech company.
A bold vision worth every early morning, late night, and rewrite.
So you persist.
Message by message.
Story by story.
Conversation by conversation.

You hold the line even when others don’t yet see the picture.
And very often they don’t, they can’t.
Most people are busy fighting fires.
Brand-building rarely feels urgent…
until suddenly, it becomes ‘indispensable’.

That’s why persistence matters in communications.
It’s discipline.
It’s direction.
It’s putting the next piece down even when nobody else thinks it matters.
And one day, the picture becomes obvious, precisely the way you always saw it.
And that’s really the truth of my five years at Arya.ag

Piece by piece, one story at a time, the same one repeated over and over again.
Relentlessly, while having a blast doing it. Building some beautiful relationships and lessons on the way.

To those who have been with me and shared in my chaos – THANK YOU!
It would not have been as fun without you.
You made the puzzle worth solving.