Kippa, a Nigerian fintech company has made the tough decision to cease its offline payments product (KippaPay), and is in the process of downsizing its workforce by the end of the year.
The company did not however disclose the number of employees to be laid off, but stated that the core team responsible for the payments products will exit their role by December.
CEO and Founder of Kippa Kennedy Ekezie described the proposed layoff as a tough decision taken, stating that it was related to profitable product portfolio consolidation.
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In his words,
“Today, we announce that we’re pulling back our offline payments product KippaPay from the market. Over the past 18 months, we launched and grew this arm of our product suite to support merchants with offline payments and agency banking through our POS terminals.
“This company decision is related to profitable product portfolio consolidation. This decision unfortunately means that the core of our team supporting the KippaPay product will be leaving us in December 2023. This has been an incredibly difficult decision for us to make, but we are incredibly proud of the work this team has done, and the impact KippaPay had on our merchants.
“Starting November 15th, our KippaPay product will no longer be available for use by merchants. In the weeks leading up to this, we will provide support for our merchants and partners helping them transition off the product and resolve any pending settlements.”
Pending the product’s final shutdown, the company had stated that it would resolve pending settlements for its merchants.
About Kippa
Founded in June 2021, Kippa provides digital business and financial management solutions to SMEs in Nigeria.
One of the app’s most important features, is that it helps merchants keep track of debtors and send automated reminders to them. The company claims that merchants who use Kippa recover debts 3 times faster.
Since its inception, the startup has received backing from international investors to develop products that will help SMEs grow their businesses.
In 2021, Kippa raised pre-seed funding of $3.2 million with the plan of onboarding merchants to a simple-to-use mobile bookkeeping app to help them digitize bookkeeping and recover customer debt.
According to Kippa, since the pre-seed announcement, it stated that it has made tremendous progress in recruiting ex-regulators and former senior executives at top startups, which include Opay, NIBSS, Khatabook, TeamApt, OKCredit, and Unified Payments, among others.
In an interview with th CEO Ekezie, he said Kippa had more than 130,000 active businesses, ranging from small kiosks and street corner shops to local food vendors and high-end merchants.
Fast forward to 2022, Kippa raised $8.4 million in an oversubscribed seed round from backers such as Goodwater Capital, TEN13 VC, Rocketship VC, Saison Capital, Crestone VC, VentureSouq, Horizon Partners, and Vibe Capital.
In the same year, the company announced that it had obtained a license from Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), to operate as a Super Agent, just like agency banking players OPay and Moniepoint.
Kippa works as a simple app where small business owners can keep track of their daily income and expense transactions, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory, and generally monitor how their businesses ebb and flow over time.
That startup says its mission is to make it easy for anyone to start and run profitable small businesses in Africa.