Nigerian Fintech Okra Gets $3.5 Million Seed Round Investment

Nigerian fintech startup Okra announced today that it has closed $3.5 million in a seed funding round to expand its data infrastructure across the country.

This funding round was led by U.S.-based Susa Ventures. Other investors include TLcom Capital (the sole investor from its $1 million pre-seed round in 2020); Accenture Ventures; Angel investors like Rob Solomon, Chairman at GoFundMe and a former partner at Accel; Arpan Shah, founding engineer and ex-head of data platforms and data products at Robinhood; and Hongxia Zhong, founding engineer, and ex-senior engineering manager at Robinhood. In total, Okra has raised $4.5 million in two rounds.

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Launched last year by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, Okra is an Open Finance platform that enables businesses and developers to build personalised digital services and financial products for customers. Its API creates a secure portal and process to exchange real-time financial information between customers, applications, and banks.

Fara Ashiru Jituboh, co-founder and CEO/CTO of Okra commented on the funding secured,  “We build the tools that businesses need to achieve full digital transformation and we are excited to be welcoming some highly strategic global investors as we scale our Open Finance-as-a-Service operations. The opportunities to collaborate and grow together are significant and we are now in a strong position to continue to build and scale in the African, and global API space.”

The fintech claims to have provided its services to a “high calibre” of financial institutions, startups, and government agencies including;  Interswitch, Access Bank, uLesson, Aella App (YC W17), and over 100 digital-first platforms. In just under a year, it has seen an average month-on-month API call growth of 281 percent. In addition, the company has analysed over 20 million transactions and analysed more than 5.5M transaction lines in March 2021 alone.

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Okra also claims to onboard new clients in 24 hours or less while supporting them through the use of cases specific to their product.

“We build the tools that businesses need to achieve full digital transformation and we are excited to be welcoming some highly strategic global investors as we scale our Open Finance-as-a-Service operations. The opportunities to collaborate and grow together are significant and we are now in a strong position to continue to build and scale in the African, and global API space,” Jituboh said.

Peterside said the companies that will dominate the business landscape over the next decade are prioritizing a digital-first experience for their customers today and will leverage data and personalisation to win market share over time. 

“We share the same vision on Open Finance in Africa and are excited to be working closely with the team at Susa. Having Accenture Ventures join us at seed stage speaks volumes about our team’s ability to execute at a global scale,” he said.