Kippa raises $8.4m in seed round
Nigerian financial management app, Kippa has raised $8.4 million seed funding to help small and mid-size enterprises (SME). This comes after the company acquired payment solution service license (PSSL) from the Central Bank of Nigeria to act as a Super-Agent to its 500,000 merchants across 774 local governments in the country.
“We have over 500,000 merchants on our app and there’s a lot of opportunities for us to do more for them and provide more financial services,” said Kippa’s CEO, Ekezie-Joseph.
“The super-agent licence allows merchants and typical neighbourhood shops who already use our bookkeeping app into a one-stop-shop for essential financial services for their customers,” he added.
With the license, Kippa can offer financial services such as cash withdrawals and deposits, bills and utility payments, bank account opening and insurance to individual customers who come to their small shops regularly to make everyday purchases.
Read More: Kippa Earns CBN’s PSS Licence To Operate As Super Agent
The company is one of the bookkeeping platforms in sub-Saharan Africa apart from Pastel, Bumpa, OZE and Bamba. In November 2021, it secured $3.2 million pre-seed funding after its launch in June 2021 by Kennedy Ekezie Joseph, Duke Ekezie, and Jephthah Uche – to improve the day to day transactions of small business owners with a simple-to-operate app. It allows SMEs to open bank accounts, keep track of their daily income and expenditure, create invoices and receipts and build online web stores.
The new fund round included global investors. Goodwater Capital, TEN13 VC, Rocketship VC, Saison Capital (the venture arm of Credit Saison), Crestone VC (led by Inanc Balci, Co-founder and former CEO at Lazada), VentureSouq, Horizon Partners and Vibe Capital were among those that participated.
According to Kippa’s CEO, Kennedy Ekezie Joseph, small businesses are expected to grow within the next three to five years. “We expect the number of digitally active small businesses to grow exponentially over the next three to five years. As more small businesses come online, Kippa will own the money button on the devices of these merchants.”
“Our mission is to make it easy for anyone to start and run profitable small businesses in Africa. It is why we are building a full suite of software and financial services that enables this ambition, thereby empowering African business owners. We say this because we’ve spent time understanding their most significant needs,” he noted.
Having raised a total of $11 million, the company has employed ex-regulators and senior executives from OPay, TeamApt, OKCredit, NIBSS, BharatPe etc.