Fara Ashiru and David Peterside, Okra's CEO/CTO and COO respectively. |
This time, it’s $3.5m in seed money from institutional and angel investors, including founding engineers at US startup Robinhood.
The Nigerian fintech startup helps individuals and
businesses gain access to financial data using an API.
Businesses can use Okra to get customers real-time and
historical account balance, carry out Know Your Customer checks, obtain
customer transaction history of up to 24 months, and set up links for direct
debits.
Okra has a feature for customers too; for connecting
personal bank accounts to other fintech apps. The startup says it is connected
to all banks in Nigeria and promises “a 99.9% guaranteed uptime.”
Founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, Okra is
one among an emerging crop of startups breaking into fintech with a focus on
expanding access to financial data.
These startups are driving the conversation around open
banking, heralding a financial services ecosystem where banks open up their
trove of customer data and accelerate innovation.
Okra lists Access Bank, Interswitch, uLesson, Carbon, and
Autochek as companies who currently use the Okra API.
Since launching in January 2020, the number of requests made
to Okra’s API has grown month-on-month by an average of 281%, according to the
company. That growth comes on the back of over 20 million transactions and over
5.5 million transaction lines analysed in March 2021 alone.
Building on this traction, the startup hopes its new
injection of funding will help expand its offering across Nigeria. Ashiru, the
CEO, says the startup’s quest is to help businesses with digital transformation
tools and that they are “in a strong position to continue to build and scale in
the African and global API space.”
The seed funding round was led by Susa Ventures, a venture
capital firm based in California which invests in seed-stage startups (their
portfolio includes Andela and Robinhood, the investment app).
The round also marks a first ever investment in an African
startup by Accenture, the global consulting firm. TLCom Capital, the only firm
to invest in Okra’s $1m round last year, also participated in this seed round
as did a trio of angel investors: Rob Solomon (chairman at GoFundMe), Arpan
Shah and Hongxia Zhong (both former founding engineers at Robinhood).
Omobola Johnson, Senior Partner at TLcom Capital, praised
Ashiru for her “technical depth and expertise” and believes the combination
with Peterside puts the startup in a good position to build “Africa’s most
stable and robust API infrastructure.”
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