Nigerian restaurant management platform Orda raises $1.1 million to scale across Africa

Orda, a restaurant management startup based in Nigeria, announced that it has raised $1.1 million in a pre-seed round to scale its platform across Africa.

Founded by CEO Guy Futi, Fikayo Akinwale,  Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila, and Namir El-Khouri in 2020, Orda is a business that provides a cloud-based restaurant management system to assist African chefs and food business owners

The pre-seed round was led by LoftyInc Capital and has other participating investors include Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors, and angel investors such as Buycoins’ Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia and Ademola Adesina.

Guy Futi says the company’s target market is the bukkas [local restaurants] and the small restaurants.

“These are the restaurants that have been using paper and pen and then that spend three to four hours on reconciliation. They don’t have access to software that does analytics and inventory management right off the gate. So, we decided to build a cloud-based restaurant software tailor-made for Africa’s massive chefs and restaurant industry,” he added.

The CTO, Fikayo Akinwale said that Orda’s full-stack and end-to-end approach helps restaurants manage these processes online while integrating local payments, logistics, inventory management and business analytics features.

“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. We can confidently say that no one has done as much work as we have to build an end-to-end solution for our food business owners.”, added Fikayo

Guy claims no other company in its space has made similar integrations. He added that these integrations, including an ePos solution that restaurants can operate in remote areas with little or no internet coverage, give Orda an edge in the market.

Orda is currently available in Nigeria and Kenya and claims its cloud-based software doubles its growth rate every three weeks. It also stated that Futi also remarked that the adoption from restaurants in markets where it operates (Nigeria and Kenya) has been “very seamless,” adding that the cloud-based software doubles its growth rate every three weeks. In a statement, Orda said its gross merchandise value (GMV) grows 15% week-on-week while processing up to 10,000 transactions weekly.

Orda’s monthly charge to use its platform is between $5 (~₦2,500) to $50 (~₦30,000). The company wants to build out financial products, especially in lending, and venture into processing payments for restaurants

According to Idris Ayo Bello, the managing partner of LoftyInc Capital, about the investment, “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.”