Business Insider Edition
African restaurant cloud operating system provider Orda announced today that it has raised a $3.4 million seed round to further digitise food businesses across the continent.
The seed round, co-led by Quona Capital and FinTech Collective, also saw participation from institutional investors, including Far Out Ventures and Outside VC, angels Doneci Kone and Julian Shapiro, and follow-on investment from Norrsken Foundation, Lofty Inc Capital and Enza Capital. Following its previous raise of $1.1 million, the current round brings Orda’s total funds raised to $4.5 million.
Founded by Guy Futi, Fikayo Akinwale, Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila, and Namir El-Khouri in 2020, Orda’s vision is to help small-sized African restaurants optimise their business and achieve sustainable growth.
Since its first fundraising announcement in January, Orda has grown its customer base to more than 600 restaurants across Nigeria and Kenya. It is now processing over 500% more weekly orders for its customers. This growth, the company says, is due to an obsession with helping small and medium-sized restaurants run their businesses better.
Before Orda, managers at these small restaurants often doubled as cooks and spent as many as four hours daily doing manual reconciliation, inventory management, and other administrative tasks. Through its products, Orda enables many African restaurants to optimise their business operations and scale distribution. Its products and services include kitchen display systems, order and inventory management, integrations with leading food aggregators (e.g. Glovo, Bolt Food, Chowdeck, Jise, Wabi2b, etc.), accounting software, microsites, mobile apps and—soon to come—lending.
Even better, when restaurants use these products, Orda provides them with advanced business analytics that informs them of customer behaviour, which helps with inventory optimisation and loss prevention.
Following the progress in the last 12 months, Orda believes it has hit product-market fit, evidenced by the rapid rate of adoption, rising referrals, and increasing ease of onboarding new restaurants.
”We have a huge backlog of restaurants to onboard, and we’re confident of reaching 1,000 active restaurants within the next three months. Our vendors love our solution, and we do an excellent job of listening to feedback and incorporating that into the new features we roll out. We do our very best to always centre the restaurant’s experience at the heart of our operations,” said Afua Ahwoi, Head of Operations at Orda.
With the recently completed fundraise, Orda has vertical expansion in sight as it looks to improve its payments, credit and lending solutions, helping customers unlock even more value from their businesses.
“Focusing solely on restaurants has given us deeper insights into how they are run and their financial behaviour. We believe we can accurately predict when a restaurant needs a cash injection or a small loan and are looking to work with partners who can provide those services,” said Futi.
Orda’s founders have also attributed the startup’s growth over the last 12 months to the excellent team it has put together, a trend it hopes to continue in the coming months. Within the last year, it has brought in Afua Ahwoi (ex-Chief of Staff at Cleo) as Head of Operations and Strategy, and Modesola Osasomi, (ex-assistant VP - Propositions Manager at Barclays Bank) to head growth.
