The Nigerian tech firm Okra has been named among top 100 Tech Pioneers by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Okra was listed among other African tech firms such as Rwanda’s Ampersand and three tech firms from Kenya, namely Sendy, Access Afya and Pula Advisors.
Sendy is featured for its role in building fulfillment infrastructure for e-commerce and consumer brands while Access Afya has been recognised for offering high-quality healthcare for the global mass market
Okras Team
On the other side, Pula Advisors was recognised for its innovation and impact in using technology to provide agriculture insurance to millions of smallholder farmers in emerging markets.
“Farmers in emerging markets are the most hardworking citizens of the world yet the most likely to already feel the impact of climate change. They need products like agriculture insurance and digital agronomy advice to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable climate,” Pula CEO Thomas Njeru said.
Technology Pioneers are selected based on the WEF community’s selection criteria which consider innovation, leadership, and relevance to the global organisation’s platforms.
Pula, at the moment, has influence in 16 countries and has listed about 6 million smallholder farmers.
The selected firms will participate in WEF events to drive panel discussions on key industry and societal issues throughout the year.
“We are honoured to be recognised by the World Economic Forum as a technology pioneer. This recognition affirms our belief that the digital economy in Africa presents the biggest opportunity for young people to participate in the economy,” said Sendy founder and CEO Mesh Alloys.
Some of the companies that have been honoured by Technology Pioneer in the past include giant tech companies like Google, Airbnb, Mozilla, Spotify, Scribd, Kaggle, Kickstarter, Palantir Technologies, and Twitter.
Technology Pioneer was launched in 2000 for growing companies around the globe that are involved in the design and development of new technologies and innovations.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Okra, a Nigerian API fintech startup, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round from a diverse group of international investors. It previously raised $1 million in a pre-seed round in 2020.
“We want to ensure that we’re solving our customers’ problems as fast as possible and give the clients the support they need. We want to make sure our hiring speed is the same as the speed of our growth and I think being able to raise capital is one of the solvers of that problem… making sure we’re bringing great talent and building a great team,” said Ashiru Jituboh, CEO of Okra.
Ashiru Jituboh, CEO of Okra
Here Is What You Need To Know
Susa Ventures, based in the United States, led the seed round, which included early VC investments in global companies such as Robinhood and Flexport. Its investment in Okra is its second in an African startup, following Andela.
TLcom Capital, which was the sole investor in the company’s initial pre-seed round, Accenture Ventures, a Fortune Global 500 company, and some angel investors are among the other investors in the round.
The money will be used to develop the company’s data infrastructure across Nigeria, and a significant portion of it will, also, go into talent acquisition.
There seems to be a lot of reasons why TLcom Capital and other investors settled for the startup. Although TLcom’s managing partner, Maurizio Caio, had in 2019 hinted that TLcom was steering more toward investments in infrastructure oriented tech companies and away from Africa’s more commoditized payments and lending startups, the VC firm said it was attracted to Okra for its ability to serve the continent’s broader financial sector.
“It’s a service that other fintechs can plug into and utilize, so it’s accelerating the growth of fintech across the continent…That to us was a big hook,” TLcom’s Andreata Muforo said in an interview last year.
Another major factor that might have attracted the VC to the startup is its co-founder Fara Ashiru Jituboh.
“We found her to be very strong and also liked the fact that she’s a technical founder,” said Muforo.
Again, the coming back of TLcom to invest in the startup after solely investing $1m in its pre-seed round in 2020 is tell-tale of the startup’s continued growth.
The company claims to have logged over 150,000 live API calls, with a 281 percent increase in API calls month over month. It also said it has analysed over 20 million transactions, analyzing over 5.5 million transactions in the last month alone.
Susa Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing primarily in seed rounds. The firm was founded in October 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco, United States. The VC closed two new funds in January 2019, including a $90 million early-stage fund — its third flagship fund — and the first opportunity fund, to which investors contributed $50 million.
Accenture Ventures is Accenture’s corporate venture capital arm, and it prefers to invest in growth-stage companies that use an open innovation strategy to develop new business technologies. Based in the United States, the VC invests mostly in artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain and cybersecurity.
How Startup Okra Works
A Look, In Simple Terms, Of What Startup Okra Does
Okra, a motherboard for Africa’s 21st century financial system, was founded in June 2019 by Nigerians Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside. You can link all your African bank accounts to an app using the Okra app.
“We are building the industry’s “super-connector” by creating a secure portal and process to exchange financial information back and forth between customer, applications, and banks,” the startup says on its website.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest financial center, with a population of 200 million people, but there is still a disconnect between fintech apps and banks, according to Okra’s Ashiru Jituboh.
“Here in this market there’s no way to directly connect your bank account through an API or directly to an application,” she said.
Okra sells multiple paid integration packages and makes the code for its five product categories — authorization, balance, purchases, identity, and accounts — available to developers.
Okra already has a diverse client list that includes PalmPay, a mobile payments startup, Axa Mansard, and Renmoney, a Nigerian digital lender.
According to Ashiru Jituboh, the startup earns money from product fees and each time a user links a bank account to a client.
“The response is we’re not doing payments, but what we’re doing is making processes with [payment providers] much smoother,” she said when asked how Okra varies from other well-funded fintech companies in Nigeria, such as Flutterwave or Interswitch.
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
Efforts aimed at creating seamless banking experience for the Nigerian market by a new fintech venture to connect banking app has received a boost from an American firm. The Lagos based fintech venture, Okra, which has within a year racked up a unique mix of accomplishments created a product that generates revenues from both payment startups and established financial institutions. To take its dream to the next level, Okra just raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from TLcom Capital — a $71 million Africa focused VC firm that rarely invests in early-stage companies or fintech. The startup is also poised to enter new markets and it’s hiring.
Founded in June 2019 by Nigerians Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, Okra casts itself as a motherboard for the continent’s 21st century financial system. Speaking on the drive behind the firm, co-founder Ashiru Jituboh said that “we’re building a super-connector API that…allows individuals to connect their bank accounts directly to third party applications. And that’s their African bank accounts starting in the largest market in Africa, Nigeria.”
As a sector, fintech has become the continent’s highest funded tech space, receiving the bulk of an estimated $2 billion in VC that went to African startups in 2019. Those ventures, and a number of the continent’s established banks, are in a race to build market share through financial inclusion. By several estimates — including The Global Findex Database — the continent is home to the largest percentage of the world’s unbanked population, with a sizable number of underbanked consumers and SMEs.
With 54 countries, 1.2 billion people and thousands of relatively young startups, there are a lot of moving parts in Africa’s fintech space. Similar to U.S. Company Plaid, Okra is shaping a platform that connects accounts and financial data to banking apps into a revenue generating product.
With Africa’s largest population of 200 million people, Nigeria serves as a major financial hub — but there seem to be a disconnect between fintech apps and banks, according to Okra’s Ashiru Jituboh. “Here in this market there’s no way to directly connect your bank account through an API or directly to an application,” she said. Okra offers several paid packages for those types of integrations and opens up the code to developers for its five product categories: authorization, balance, transactions, identity and accounts.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
