Nigerian Fintech Startup Okra raises $3.5M

Nigerian Fintech startup and Open Finance pioneers, Okra, have just announced they secured a $3.5m Seed fund in a funding round led by US-based Susa Ventures. TLcom Capital and Accenture Ventures also participated in the funding round.

Okra was founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside in January 2020, the startup operated an Open Finance platform using a digital transformation tool for businesses in Africa and its API enables users to build personalized digital services and Fintech products for customers.

Since its launch, the Fintech startup has been able to provide services to high financial institutions, startups, and government agencies including Interswitch, Access Bank, uLesson, Aella App, and over 100 digital-first platforms.

This funding round comes just under a year from closing its $1m pre-seed round in which only TLcom Capital participated in the round. These funding rounds bring Okra’s total funding at seed to $4.5m. The startup has noted that the capital will be deployed to expand Okra’s data infrastructure across Nigeria.

In just under a year from launch, the Fintech infrastructure company has seen an avg. month-on-month API call growth of 281%. In addition, the company has analyzed 20M+ transactions and analyzed over 5.5M transaction lines in March 2021 alone.

Fara Ashiru Jituboh, Okra co-founder and CEO/CTO says, “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.”