Orda, a Nigerian restaurant management startup, has raised a pre-seed funding round of US$1.1 million to accelerate its growth and expand across the continent.
Techstars – Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, and Agrolay Advisors, as well as Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia, Ademola Adesina, and other angel investors, participated in the pre-seed round.
Following the funding, the company plans to accelerate its growth and expand across the continent.
Orda is a cloud-based restaurant management system that was launched in 2020 with the goal of providing a single operating system to run African eateries. The Lagos-based firm has partnered with a number of well-known African and international restaurants, including Barcelos, Eric Kayser, Johnny Rockets, and Ofadaboy, since its inception.
For small to medium-sized food enterprises, Orda has developed a full-stack strategy to integrating local payments, logistics firms, inventory management, and business analytics. It claims to be the continent’s first technological solution that allows restaurants to accept and process all in-store, website, social media, WhatsApp, Jumia Food, Glovo, and Bolt Food orders from a single, simple interface.
Restaurants in Nigeria and Kenya can use the startup’s cloud-based technology right now. As Orda currently processes thousands of weekly transactions, its Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) has been increasing at a rate of more than 15% every week.
Guy Futi, the startup’s CEO, said the team has maintained striving to solve the genuine pain points of chefs, caterers, and small restaurants when asked about the technology’s inspiration.
“From that Orda grew. Before Orda, a small food business owner could spend up to four 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,” he said.
“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 digitisation to the sector,” said CTO Fikayo Akinwale.
Idris Ayodeji Bello, managing partner of LoftyInc Capital Management, said his team invested in Orda because it was 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,” he said.