Orda, a Nigerian food tech startup that provides digital operating systems for restaurants, has secured $3.4 million in seed funding co-led by emerging market investor Quona Capital and New York-based FinTech Collective.
The funding was backed by other investors that include existing ones such as LoftyInc Capital, Enza Capital and Norrsken Foundation, as well as new venture capital firms like Outside VC and Far Out Ventures.
The platform, co-founded two years ago by Guy Futi, Fikayo Akinwale, Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila and Namir El-Khouri, serves small, independent restaurants – helping them to make a shift from their manual style of operation to faster and more efficient digital management.
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With a $50 billion industry made up mostly of small restaurants – which form the largest part of Orda’s target market, the startup has a pool of potential clients that is accelerating its growth.
Orda’s tech-based services have recorded a tremendous increase in the number of restaurants embracing the platform for its reconciliation and inventory management. The rapid growth is believed to be part of the reasons investors are betting big on the startup. Orda has raised $4.5 million this year, including the $1.1 million it raised in January.
Orda said it plans to use the investment to onboard payments feature and also expand its network of restaurants across Africa, with Ivory Coast and South Africa being the next target.
The startup’s operating system offers digital features that allow businesses to handle parts of their business online. The system also offers other features that enable clients access to kitchen display systems, accounting software and integrations with food aggregators such as Bolt Food, Glovo Chowdeck.
“When a restaurant owner moves from pen and paper to a fully automated digital platform, it’s incredibly empowering. Suddenly they have insights available to them that can improve their productivity and margins, enabling them to grow their businesses. A solution like Orda can have an outsized impact on small and medium-sized restaurants and the livelihoods of those who operate them,” Kofoworola Agbaje, senior investment associate at Quona Capital, said.
Guy Futi, Orda’s chief executive officer, told TechCrunch in an interview that the company’s software-powered processes have inspired the tremendous adoption it is recording right now.
“We take an interesting approach to software and helping restaurant owners set up. Our software digitizes the process of those who write things in hand and helps them figure out their inventory management and recipe yields,” Futi said.
Futi added that Orda has reached product-market fit already with the number of vendors (600) it has recorded in Nigeria and Kenya, its two markets, since last year.
The chief executive told TechCrunch that there are “hundreds more” in the pipeline waiting to be onboarded, as Orda plans to serve more than 1,000 restaurants by the end of Q1 2023. The company’s increase has been notable in the number of orders it processes weekly for clients.
Futi said that Orda now processes over 50,000 orders weekly for its vendors, 5x what it recorded as of this January, with its gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing 30% month-on-month. He added that the startup is “seeing fast-paced growth in Nigeria and Kenya with a retention rate of above 95%.”
Orda offers vendors a flexible model with varying prices that Futi said has increased the company’s revenue growth by 30% month-on-month. The pricing model, per TechCrunch, allows restaurants to choose between three payment plans: N1,000 (~$1.54), N5,000 (~$7.69) and N20,000 (~$30.76) to access different parts of the software, ranging from order management and an omnichannel to integrations with food aggregators and delivery platforms and setup personnel.
Besides its digital process services for restaurants, Orda wants to add more features to accommodate its plan to expand financial products – building on an existing platform that Futi said it already processes payments for 10% of its vendors.