Nigerian FinTech, Kippa, has raised $8.4M in a SEED round from Goodwater Capital, TEN13 VC, Rocketship VC, Saison Capital, Crestone VC, VentureSouq, Horizon Partners, and Vibe Capital. The startup, launched in June 2021 by Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, Duke Ekezie, and Jephthah Uche, is aimed at improving the lifecycle of small businesses across the country with its financial management and payments platform.
FinTech is the top industry across the Emerging Venture Markets, as seen in our Fintech H1 2022 Venture Investment Report. The sector raised $1.5Bn in the first half of the year with Nigeria taking the lead across MEAPT. The top sub-industry for FinTech was Payment Solutions, accounting for over 40% of the total funding accumulated in H1. An interesting feat for the industries of FinTech and E-commerce is the startups coming together to digitize the traditional small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially in regions like Africa and Pakistan. Bookkeeping is an essential practice for small business owners and startups have been coming up with digital solutions to aid them. We’ve seen the likes of Pakistan’s Creditbook, Nigeria’s Pastel, and KSA’s Penny. Software raise sizable funds over the years.
Bookkeeping platforms for small and medium businesses in Africa run operations such as managing money, inventory tracking, and records of staff and suppliers offline, mainly with pen and paper or ledgers. All these inefficiencies, asides from being time-consuming, lead to errors and affects cash flow and finance. With Kippa, 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.
The majority of small businesses in Nigeria aren’t formally registered due to costs and complexities in navigating the entire process. Thus, First, Kippa launched an incorporation product for small businesses a few months ago. CEO Ekezie-Kennedy told TechCrunch, “We’ve built a product on top of the current Kippa product that allows businesses to register in 3 days for N15,000. This feature forms the basis for Kippa’s plans to stack financial products besides getting significant traction and driving more revenue”
Kippa will use the investment to develop financial products that help SMEs grow their businesses and grow its team in Nigeria. Last week, the company announced that it obtained a license from Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), to operate as a Super Agent. With the license, merchants on the Kippa platform can, in turn, act as agents and offer financial services such as cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bills and utility payments, and insurance to individual customers who come to their small shops regularly to make everyday purchases. Ekezie-Joseph concluded, “The super agent license allows merchants and typical neighborhood shops who already use our bookkeeping app into a one-stop-shop for essential financial services for their customers.”
