Kippa, a financial management and payments platform for Nigerian SMEs, has announced it has raised $8.4M in seed funding.
Founded in June 2021, Kippa raised pre-seed funding of $3.2 million in November 2021 with the idea of onboarding merchants to a simple-to-use mobile bookkeeping app to help them digitize book-keeping and recover customer debt.
The over-subscribed seed round was participated by a slew of global investors that include:
- 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 at Lazada)
- VentureSouq
- Horizon Partners
- Vibe Capital
This is how Kippa describes the kinds of problems the platform solves:
Running a small business is chaotic, from managing money to keeping track of inventory, business records, staff, and suppliers. Shopkeepers are confronted with manual processes or expensive technology that are time-consuming and prone to errors and wall them off from access to finance to run their businesses. – Kippa
Currently, the startup provides a suite of financial services to assist the management of SME businesses including:
- Enable small-sized business owners to incorporate their businesses legally
- Open bank accounts
- Receive and send payments
- Build online web stores
- Manage their entire business from one platform
The startup says:
- Has operations in 774 local governments in Nigeria
- Serving over 500,000 merchants within its network
- Has seen the annualized transaction recorded on the platform exceed $3 billion
Furthermore, Kippa is licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as a super agent in the payment service solution category. With this license, the company is using the merchant shops in its network to offer various financial services that include:
- Cash withdrawals and deposits
- Bank account opening
- Bills and utility payments
- Insurance
Kippa CEO, Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, believes the company is well positioned to be the primary financial service provider for the over 49.3 million Nigerians running SMEs:
We expect the number of digitally active small businesses to grow exponentially over the next three to five years. As more small businesses come online, Kippa will own the money button on the devices of these merchants. – CEO, Kippa
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