Nigerian fintech start-up, Okra, announced that it has completed a $3.5 million seed funding round.
According to the start-up, which was founded in 2019, the funds will be utilized to expand its data infrastructure across the country.
The seed funding round was led by Susu ventures, which is a venture capital firm based in California which invests in seed-stage startups.
Other participations came from institutional and angel investors, including founding engineers at the US startup – Robinhood.
Speaking in the new feat achieved by the company, Fara Ashiru Jituboh, co-founder and CEO of Okra, commented thus:
“We build the tools that businesses need to achieve full digital transformation and we are excited to be welcoming some highly strategic global investors as we scale our open finance as a service operation.”
The company, which was founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, is billed as Africa’s first API super-connector. The start-up, last year, raised US$1 million funding from TLcom Capital.
The start-up has now raised a total of $4.5 million in two separate funding rounds.
“The opportunities to collaborate and grow together are significant and we are now in a strong position to continue to build and scale in Africa and global API space. The companies that will dominate the business landscape over the next decade are prioritizing a digital-first experience for their customers today and will leverage data and personalization to win market share over time,” David Peterside the co-founder and COO said.
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The Nigerian fintech startup helps individuals and businesses gain access to financial data using an API.
Okra enables its users to get customers real-time and historical account balance, carry out “Know Your Customer” checks, obtain customer transaction history of up to 24 months, and set up links for direct debits.
The company said it has recorded over 150,000 live API calls, recording an average month-on-month API call growth of 281%.
Since its launch, Okra has aggressively pushed by connecting to all banks in Nigeria. The company claims to have a 99.9% guaranteed uptime.
The fintech infrastructure platform has provided its services to high calibre financial institutions, government agencies and startups.
Okra lists Access Bank, Interswitch, uLesson, Carbon, and Autochek as companies who currently use the Okra API.