When food business owners across the country try to reconcile all their transactions after the day’s business, they use paper and pen, spend hours, and are exposed to discrepancies or losses.
Orda is a company that wants to solve this problem as well as most of the pain points of chefs, caterers, bukas, and restaurants. Orda realised that these food businesses are not onboarded on local payment solutions, do not have enough online sales channels, and lacked access to adequate logistics providers, which have made their operations difficult.
So, it created a cloud-based solution that integrates local payments, logistics companies, inventory management, and business analytics for small to medium-sized food businesses, to make it easier for these businesses to scale.
Recently, Orda announced that it raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round to expand its operations to more African countries. The company claims it is the only solution on the continent that allows restaurant owners to manage every part of their business from a single platform and is used by restaurants in Nigeria and Kenya.
Its recent round was led by early-stage VC fund, LoftyInc Capital, and had participation from Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors; and angel investors like Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia, and Ademola Adesina.
Speaking on the raise, Idris Ayodeji Bello, Managing Partner of LoftyInc Capital said, “We loved investing in Orda because it 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 founded by Guy Futi (CEO), Adinlewa “Fikayo” Akinwale (CTO), Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila, and Namir El-Khouri, and allows restaurants to accept and process all their in-store, website, social media, Whatsapp, Jumia Food, Glovo, and Bolt food orders from one easy-to-use interface.
Futi, a former Jumia Managing Director, said, at the core of Orda’s business is its ePos that allows these food businesses to operate in areas with little to no internet coverage. “Orda was built from 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 Akinwale, in a statement.
Orda has, for the past 18 months, been speaking with customers, building and iterating its products, and is currently processing thousands of transactions weekly, it said in a statement.
Futi explained that, even though they are just starting off, they are already hitting 10%–15% Gross Domestic Value (GMV) weekly, and increased adoption by restaurants.
Futi, who has been in the food business in Africa for over 5 years, said that while there are millions of chefs, caterers, and bukas on the continent, no one is currently providing the solution Orda does, which makes the opportunity massive.
