Arboreal Bioinnovations Raises Rs 230 Crore in Series A Funding
- ByStartupStory | July 30, 2026
Lucknow-based Arboreal Bioinnovations Private Limited, a specialty food and nutraceutical ingredients technology company, has closed a Series A round of Rs 230 crore, co-led by EAAA the alternatives investment arm of Edelweiss and the agriculture-focused venture firm Omnivore. Existing backer Rainmatter, the venture platform run by Zerodha, also joined the round, and industry watchers are already calling it one of the largest Series A raises India’s specialty food ingredients space has seen so far.
The company’s story goes back further than most people would guess. It traces its roots to 2011-12, when co-founder Swati was working on a student project under the European Union’s Climate-KIC programme during her time at Imperial College London. Swati, an alumna of IIT (ISM) Dhanbad and Imperial College London, and Manish Chauhan, who studied at BITS Pilani and London Business School, chose to return to India to build the company around a proprietary stevia-processing technology. What started as a plant-based sweetener business has since grown into a wider portfolio covering nutritional yeast proteins, cacao ingredients, and natural sugar-reduction solutions, with customers across the nutraceutical, beverage, and bakery sectors.
Speaking about the round, Swati, the company’s CEO and co-founder, described it as validation of the direction Arboreal has been building toward, noting that the funding gives the company room to accelerate her work on clean, science-led solutions for some of the food industry’s more pressing nutritional challenges solutions built in India but meant for a global market. Chauhan, the co-founder and COO, spoke of the raise as a turning point in the company’s journey, one that moves it from simply owning ingredient IP toward driving bigger shifts across categories through what he called ingredient-first innovation, adding that the confidence shown by EAAA, Omnivore, and Rainmatter reflects belief in both the platform and the road ahead.
For EAAA, this is also a milestone of its own the deal is the first investment to come out of its second Discovery Fund, which closed recently at more than Rs 1,200 crore, making Arboreal something of a flagship bet for the fund right out of the gate.
With this capital, the company plans to invest more deeply in research, scale up its manufacturing infrastructure, and push further into ingredient innovation, positioning itself as a technology-driven supplier serving both Indian and international consumer brands.
It’s a striking jump for a company that had raised only about $5.5 million across its previous funding rounds, and it lands at a moment when investors are clearly hungry for natural, India-made ingredient alternatives as food and beverage brands come under growing pressure to move away from sugar and synthetic additives.
What remains to be seen is whether this capital actually converts into manufacturing scale on the ground, since neither Arboreal nor its investors have put numbers to that part of the plan yet.
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