Kippa is a platform that helps small businesses in Nigeria manage their finances and accept payments. The company recently announced that it had completed a new financing round in which it raised $8.4 million. With the completion of this fundraising effort, Kippa will have brought in a total of 11 million dollars.
During this most recent round of funding, Kippa brought several new worldwide investors on board. Some of these investors were Goodwater Capital, TEN13 VC, Rocketship VC, Saison Capital (the venture arm of Credit Saison), Crestone VC (led by Inanc Balci, the co-founder and former CEO of Lazada), VentureSouq, Horizon Partners, and Vibe Capital.
Kippa Obtains licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria to assist SMEs
What the funding will do
With the license and funding, merchants on the Kippa platform can, in turn, function as agents and offer financial services to individual consumers who come to their small shops regularly to make routine purchases. Some of these services are getting cash out and putting money in, opening a bank account, paying bills and utility bills, and getting insurance.
Over the past year, Kippa has been able to hire former senior executives and regulators from some of the top fintech companies, such as OPay, BharatPe, Khatabook, TeamApt, OKCredit, NIBSS, and Unified Payments.
According to Ekezie-Joseph, “our mission is to make it easy for anyone to start and run profitable small businesses in Africa,” mainly what they want to do. “This is why we are building a full suite of software and financial services that enables this ambition, thereby empowering African business owners,” the company said in a statement. We can say this because we have worked hard to understand their essential needs.
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Kippa was first made as an app for managing money. Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, Duke Ekezie, and Jephthah Uche launched it in June 2021. Small business owners can use the app to track their daily income and expenses, make invoices and receipts, manage their inventory, and keep an eye on how their businesses are doing in general over time.
In November of 2016, the company announced that it had successfully raised pre-seed funding of $3.2 million from Target Global and other investors.
Kippa is one of many financial management platforms like OZÉ, Bumpa, and Prospa aimed at the fifty million small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in Nigeria and the larger market in sub-Saharan Africa.
Along with other agency banking firms like OPay and TeamApt, the company announced a week ago that it had secured a Super-Agent licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the most powerful financial institution in Nigeria.
During a previous interview, Ekezie-Joseph stated that “what this license does is that it allows us to empower all of our customers with tools and infrastructure, not just to accept payments, but to start to offer financial services to their end customers.” This is what the license does. The company said, “It gives us the chance to integrate with the national switches and gives us the chance to offer business-to-business platforms and services to other fintechs.”
About Kippa
For small African enterprises, Kippa is the one-stop shop for managing their finances. They made a simple accounting and banking service for small businesses, which gave African retailers their first chance to join the digital economy.