Kenyan Digital Addressing Startup OkHi Lands $1.5M Seed Extension
OkHi, a digital addressing technology firm that assists businesses in lowering verification time and increasing the accuracy of information based on data collected from several sources, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help it expand its operations. The current round brings the total seed capital raised by the company to $3 million.
Chapel Hill Denham, founder and CEO of Flutterwave, and EXFI, a syndicate of ex-Googlers, are among the round’s investors.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Timbo Drayson founded the startup in 2014. Its solutions enable banks, fintech companies, and other businesses to collect and verify customer addresses via their cellphones, obviating the need for utility bills and in-person interactions. According to the company, it is the world’s only smart address verification solution that includes this smartphone feature.
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OkHi’s service integrates with a mobile banking or fintech application, enabling banks and fintech companies to acquire and verify their customers’ accurate addresses digitally.
According to Drayson, the business is in discussions with 15 additional banks and fintech companies, with plans to grow internationally in the coming months. Additionally, he claimed that OkHi would provide its address verification and collection services to industries such as last-mile deliveries, e-commerce, food delivery, and emergency services in order to diversify its client base.
OkHi charges its consumers on a per-transaction basis. When a business validates a customer’s address properly, it is charged N500, or roughly $1. OkHi claims to have “hundreds of thousands” of users.
Drayson stated that his company is receiving significant interest from businesses in a variety of countries worldwide, including Egypt, India, South America, and Southeast Asia.
However, the company, which has provided addresses in 54 countries to yet, is disregarding calls to expand formally in other markets in order to concentrate on Nigeria, where it wants to reach 1 million users within the next six months.
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OkHi is eager to swiftly expand its engineering, sales, product, and engineering teams in order to accelerate customer and business development, and the investment will be key to accomplishing that goal. OkHi is tripling the size of its crew, which is based primarily in remote locations such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and London.
Okhi digital addressing Okhi digital addressing
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer