Kippa, a financial management and payments platform for Nigerian small businesses, announced that it has raised $8.4 million in a new financing round. This fundraise brings the total fundraised by Kippa to $11 million.
This recent fundraise saw Kippa, welcome new global investors, including 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 and Vibe Capital.
Launched in June 2021 by Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, Duke Ekezie and Jephthah Uche, Kippa started as a finance management app where small business owners can keep track of their daily income and expense transactions, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory and generally monitor how their businesses perform over time.
Last November, the company announced a $3.2 million pre-seed fundraise from Target Global and other investors.
Kippa is one of the many financial management platforms such as OZÉ, Bumpa and Prospa, targeting the 50 million SMEs in Nigeria and the larger market across sub-Saharan Africa.
Last week, the company announced that it obtained a Super-Agent licence from Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), just like other agency banking players OPay and TeamApt.
“What this licence does is that it allows us to empower all our customers with tools, and infrastructure to not just accept payments, but to start to offer financial services to their end customers,” Ekezie-Joseph told TechCabal in an earlier interview. “It affords us the opportunity to implement integration with the national switches and allows us to provide business-to-business and platform and services to other fintechs.”
With the licence, merchants on the Kippa platform can, in turn, act as agents and offer financial services such as cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bills and utility payments, and insurance to individual customers who come to their small shops regularly to make everyday purchases.
In the past year, Kippa has recruited ex-regulators and former senior executives at top fintech startups including OPay, BharatPe, Khatabook, TeamApt, OKCredit, NIBSS, and Unified Payments, amongst others.
“Our mission is to make it easy for anyone to start and run profitable small businesses in Africa,” Ekezie-Joseph said. “It is why we are building a full suite of software and financial services that enables this ambition, thereby empowering African business owners. We say this because we’ve spent time understanding their most significant needs.”
