Nigerian Cloud-Based Restaurant Management Platform Orda Secures $1.1M Pre-Seed Round

Nigeria’s startup, Orda, formerly StarKitchens has announced that it has secured a $1.1 million pre-seed round to scale its software across Africa.

The seed round was led by pan-African investor LoftyInc Capital, with other institutional investors like Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors, and angel investors such as Buycoins’ Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia and Ademola Adesina.

Orda, a cloud-based restaurant operating system built for African chefs and food business owners, is set to change the primitive method of relying on offline methods such as pen and paper to produce receipts and make reconciliations, with the company’s addressable market a segment of Africa’s non-automated restaurant industry. The company with the use of its cloud-based software wants to change the pattern of businesses not to relying on manual ways of managing their businesses. 

“There are two kinds of restaurants where the majority of our focus is on — the bukkas [local restaurants] and the small restaurants, for instance,” Orda co-founder and CEO Guy Futi told TechCrunch in an interview.

“These are the restaurants that have been using paper and pen and then that spend three to four hours on reconciliation. They don’t have access to software that does analytics and inventory management right off the gate. So, we decided to build a cloud-based restaurant software tailor-made for Africa’s massive chefs and restaurant industry.”

According to Orda CTO Fikayo Akinwale , constant building and iteration helps restaurants manage these processes online while integrating local payments, logistics, inventory management and business analytics features.

“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,” said the CTO in a statement.

The company claims the one of a kind integration it has that enables a management platform access to a dashboard, while accepting and processing orders from food delivery services included an ePos solution that restaurants can operate in remote areas with little or no internet coverage, give Orda an edge in the market, said CEO Futi.

Futi also noted that the adoption from restaurants in markets where it operates (Nigeria and Kenya) has been “very seamless,” adding that the cloud-based software doubles its growth rate every three weeks. Orda in a statement announced that its gross merchandise value (GMV) grows 15% week-on-week while processing up to 10,000 transactions weekly, with the company charging restaurants between $5 (~₦2,500) to $50 (~₦30,000) monthly to access its software. Guy Futi stated that in the wake of the company closing it’s pre-seed as it works towards raising a seed round, focus will be on building out financial products, especially in lending, and venture into processing payments for restaurants.