API fintech Startup, Okra Secures $1 million Pre-seed Investment

Nigerian based API fintech startup, Okra has secured a $1 million pre-seed investment from TLcom. Okra received the sum from the multi-million-dollar venture capital firm to expand operations.

Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside founded Okra in June 2019. Okra develops API products for other fintechs and traditional financial institutions. Its platform helps connect customer’s accounts to banking apps and retrieve real-time financial information.

In return, it generates its revenues from product fees earned when a customer uses the platform to connect a bank account to a third-party application. Some of its major clients include PalmPay, Renmoney, and AXA Mansard.

Okra plans expansion within Nigeria and other financial hubs in Africa. It chose Nigeria, because of the large population size of over 200 million citizens. The majority of the population remains underbanked, and Okra believes that it can leverage this to build Africa’s largest financial system.

The African fintech sector has been the most funded by investors. In 2019, OPay raised a total of $170 million Series B funding round, Interswitch secured $200 million, and PalmPay raised $40 million for expansion within Africa. Angel investors and several venture capital firms are vying for market share in the fast-growing sector.

Speaking about the expansion plan, Fara Ashiru Jituboh, Okra’s CEO said, “There are approximately 125mn banks accounts in Nigeria alone — but for the next two years, we will see that figure rise exponentially, which presents huge opportunities for growth. Our role within this is to deliver ease, speed and transparency to key players within the fintech space so they can get back to driving our continent forward.”