Orda, Nigerian food-tech startup, raises $1m to expand operations to South Africa

Orda, a Nigerian food-tech startup, says it has raised a pre-seed round capital of $1.1 million to expand its operations to South Africa and scale up financial products.

The company, formerly known as StarKitchens, was founded in 2020 — and currently operates in Nigeria and Kenya.

The investors who participated in the round include Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors, Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, and angel investors like Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia and Ademola Adesina.

Guy Futi, chief executive officer, Orda, said the company would use the funds to scale up financial products, especially in lending, venture into processing payments for restaurants, and expand its operations to South Africa before the end of the year.

Futi added that Orda acts as a restaurant management platform, focusing on local and small restaurants that do not have access to software that does analytics and inventory management.

“Orda was built from a near 18 months of a collaborative customer feedback loop. We listened to everything, from how African restaurants reconcile inventory, how customers pay, to how they handle logistics and more,” he said.

“Orda offers restaurants that use its platform access to a dashboard that allows them to accept and process orders from food delivery services Jumia Food, Glovo, Bolt Food, and in-store, website, social media channels like WhatsApp. In addition to this, it offers an ePOS solution that restaurants can operate in remote areas with little or no internet coverage.

“Orda also offers a cloud-based software tailor-made for African restaurants and can boast of a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) which grows 15 percent week-on-week while processing up boast of 10,000 weekly transactions.”

Idris Ayo Bello, managing partner, LoftyInc Capital, said the firm is glad to have co-led the round and invested in a startup that is interested in Africa’s restaurants.

“We loved investing in Orda because it is building the core digital infrastructure for restaurants across Africa. The team has done the hard work of figuring out the core problems that African restaurant owners are facing and is building a solution that can revolutionise the food business across the continent,” Bello said.