Okra, a Nigerian fintech platform and Open Finance pioneer, says it has secured a $3.5million seed round led by US-based Susa Ventures, with participation from TLcom Capital, and Accenture Ventures.
This comes just under a year from closing its $1 million pre-seed round with only TLcom Capital participating in the round, bringing Okra’s total funding at seed to $4.5 million.
The fintech company said the capital will be deployed to expand its data infrastructure across Nigeria.
Founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside in January 2020, Okra’s Open Finance platform is the digital transformation tool for businesses in Africa and its API enables developers and businesses to build personalized digital services and fintech products for customers.
Since launch, the fintech infrastructure company has provided its services to high calibre financial institutions, startups, and government agencies including Interswitch, Access Bank, uLesson, Aella App (YC W17) and over a 100 digital-first platforms.
In just under a year from launch, the fintech infrastructure company said it had recorded an average month-on-month API call growth of 281 per cent.
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In addition, Okra said it had analysed 20 million plus transactions and over 5.5 million transaction lines in March 2021 alone.
Speaking on the fundung, Okra Co-founder and CEO/CTO, Fara Ashiru Jituboh said, “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.”
Okra co-founder and COO, David Peterside, noted that companies that would dominate the business landscape over the next decade are aleady prioritising a digital-first experience for their customers and will leverage data and personalization 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 added.
