Aruna's $35M bet on digital fisheries hits a $60M round collapse and 40% layoffs

Aruna runs an integrated fisheries platform connecting small Indonesian fishermen to restaurants, retailers and exporters, with collection points for quality checks and logistics.

One platform could consolidate Indonesia's fragmented fishery chain, giving fishermen direct market access and fair prices — a network needing constant venture capital.

Raised US$35M in a Series A in July 2021 (Prosus Ventures, East Ventures Growth Fund, SIG, AC Ventures, MDI, Vertex), Indonesia's largest agritech Series A at the time, on top of earlier seed rounds.

Three Telkom University graduates founded Aruna in 2016 to help their fishing-industry families. They saw two problems: fishermen got unfair prices through long middleman chains, and they had no access to working capital. The platform aggregated orders, standardized quality and used transaction data for credit scoring.

The 2021 Series A funded national expansion and by 2023 Aruna claimed over 55,000 fishermen and 150 supply points. But a planned US$60M round fell through at the last moment in 2023, and investor appetite for aquatech collapsed after the eFishery fraud allegations — one Indonesian VC said investors would avoid the sector entirely for a while.

From December 2024 to January 2025 Aruna laid off roughly 40% of its workforce, calling it strategic restructuring. CEO Farid Naufal Aslam said tightening access to capital across agribusiness forced the cut; the company said it would keep operating.

The 2021–2022 funding window let Aruna grow fast, but its logistics-heavy model depended on continued venture capital to stay ahead of fixed costs.

The collapse of a US$60M round in 2023 left it without the growth capital its cost structure assumed.

The eFishery fraud scandal chilled the whole aquatech category, making a fresh round nearly impossible even for a clean operator.

Aruna's early edge — an end-to-end chain with collection points — was also its burden once capital dried up.

The company survived by cutting staff rather than shutting down, an outcome shaped by how quickly sector sentiment can turn.

A marketplace that must build physical logistics to deliver its promise is capital-intensive wearing a marketplace's clothes; when funding dries up, the fixed-cost network becomes the liability.

As of September 2026 Aruna still operates its fisheries platform, with CEO Farid Naufal Aslam leading a leaner company focused on operational efficiency after the 40% staff reduction. No major new funding round has been announced since the US$60M round collapsed in 2023, and the company's status is live-but-shrunken rather than growing.