Orda secures $1.1 million pre-seed to power digital operations at African restaurants

Orda, a Lagos-based startup has raised a $1.1 million pre-seed fund to build an all-in-one cloud-based software for Africa's food business owners.

Lofty Inc Capital led the funding with participation from Techstars – Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors, Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia, Ademola Adesina and other angel investors.

Launched in 2020 by Guy Futi (CEO), Adinlewa “Fikayo” Akinwale (CTO), Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila, and Namir El-Khouri, Orda is solving the pertinent challenges faced by African restaurant administrators such as processing orders, accepting payments and connecting to logistics providers to enable delivery.

The cloud-based restaurant operating system built for African chefs and food business owners provides ePos, integrations, and lending solutions to enable Africa’s millions of food business owners to grow and scale their businesses.

With a full-stack approach to integrating local payments, logistic companies while building inventory management, and business analytics for small to medium-sized food businesses, Orda enables restaurants to manage end-to-end operations from one place.

According to Guy Futi, CEO of Orda "we kept trying to address the very real pain points of chefs, caterers and small restaurants and from that Orda grew. Before Orda, a small food business owner could spend up to 4 hours a day  reconciling transactions while trying to figure out losses".

"We looked to alleviate that burden. In the process we noticed that food business owners were not fully integrated with local payment solutions, online sales channels, and logistic providers. This made their operations even more difficult", Futi stated while defining the technology behind Orda.

With this investment, the startup intends to increase its rate of growth and expansion across the continent, starting with South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana. Currently, Orda is available for restaurants in Nigeria and Kenya. Its gross merchandise value (GMV) has been growing at more than 15% week over week with thousands of weekly transactions.

Cloud-based points of sales are a fast-growing technology, the global market was valued at $72.28 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $116.27 billion in 2026. Modeled after the US, market leaders, Toast —which Orda is arguably the first bottom-up software providers for restaurants built by an African team. The startup’s cloud-based solution factors peculiarities unique to the market; for instance, their ePos has the ability to operate in remote areas with little to no internet coverage.

"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. We are excited to usher in much needed digitization to the sector", according to its CTO, Fikayo Akinwale.

Since its launch, the Lagos-based startup has worked with several well-known African and global restaurants including Barcelos, Eric Kayser, Johnny Rockets, Ofadaboy among others.

One of the investors, Idris Ayodeji Bello, Managing Partner of LoftyInc Capital said, "Orda 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. LoftyInc is excited to back a solution-focused team like Orda".

Orda is one of the 13 companies joining the Techstars Boulder Class of 2022 — the accelerator focuses on getting founders to product-market-fit faster and helps companies that want to raise their next round of funding run an efficient fundraising process.