Ayekart ropes in Vikas Varma as strategic advisor and mentor

NATIONAL: Ayekart has brought in former Mastercard executive Vikas Varma as strategic advisor and mentor, adding heavyweight fintech and payments expertise to its bid to build a tech-first agri-food supply chain.

Varma will work with the founding and leadership team on go-to-market strategy, commercialisation, partnerships, talent development and governance, as well as the architecture needed to support Ayekart’s next phase of scale.

A Fortune 500 technology veteran with more than three decades of experience across payments, cybersecurity, fintech and SaaS, Varma was previously chief operating officer, South Asia at Mastercard. In that role, he was a central figure in India’s digital payments expansion, working with banks, fintechs and regulators to roll out platform-led financial services at national scale.

“As we scale Ayekart’s farm-to-fork infrastructure, technology must deliver efficiency, transparency and trust across the value chain,” said Ayekart co-founder and CEO Debarshi Dutta. “Vikas Varma’s experience in building large digital ecosystems and enduring partnerships fits squarely with our ambition to design platforms for scale and resilience.”

Varma said Ayekart’s model of embedding technology across the agri-food economy gave it the foundations for long-term, responsible growth. “The focus will be on strengthening scalable platforms, trusted partnerships and robust governance,” he said. 

Ayekart operates a vertically integrated, technology-led platform that links farmers and farmer producer organisations with processors, FMCG brands and retailers. The company is active across 22-plus states and has facilitated more than Rs 7,000 crore in lifetime gross trade value, working with over 550 FPOs and more than three lakh farmers through a network of 43-plus warehouses and 200-plus processing partners.