Grace Ashiru
Kippa, which helps small businesses in Nigeria manage their finances and accept payments, said it had raised $8.4 million in a new round of funding. With the completion of this fundraising effort, Kippa will have brought in a total of 11 million dollars.
In the most recent round of funding, Goodwater Capital, TEN13 VC, Rocketship VC, Saison Capital (the venture arm of Credit Saison), Crestone VC (led by Inanc Balci, co-founder and former CEO of Lazada), VentureSouq, Horizon Partners, and Vibe Capital were among the new global investors who joined Kippa.
Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, Duke Ekezie, and Jephthah Uche started Kippa in June 2021 as an app for small business owners to keep track of their daily income and expenses, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory, and keep an eye on how their businesses are doing in general over time.
In November of 2016, the company announced that it had successfully raised pre-seed funding of $3.2 million from Target Global and other investors.
In addition to OZÉ, Bumpa, and Prospa, Kippa is one of the numerous financial management platforms aimed at the fifty million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria and the more prominent market across sub-Saharan Africa.
Along with other agency banking firms like OPay and TeamApt, the company announced a week ago that it had secured a Super-Agent license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigeria’s highest-ranking financial institution.
This license lets us give all of our customers the tools and infrastructure they need to not only accept payments but also to start offering financial services to their end customers, Ekezie-Joseph told TechCabal in a previous interview.
It gives us the possibility to build integration with the national switches and enables us to deliver business-to-business services, as well as platform services, to other fintech companies. With the license, merchants on the Kippa platform can act as agents and offer financial services like cash withdrawals and deposits, opening bank accounts, and paying bills and utilities. Providing insurance to the individual customers who frequently visit their local small stores to buy the kinds of things they need daily.
Over the previous year, Kippa has successfully recruited former senior executives and regulators from various leading fintech businesses, such as BharaPe, OPay, TeamApt, Khatabook, OKCredit, NIBSS, and Unified Payments, amongst others.
According to Ekezie-Joseph, “Our objective is to make it simple for anyone to launch and manage a profitable small business anywhere in Africa.”
For this reason, we are developing a comprehensive set of software and financial services that will make this goal possible, thereby giving African business owners more power. We say this because we’ve taken the time to determine their most significant needs.”
