Orda, formerly called StarKitchens, has announced that it has raised a $1.1 million pre-seed fund to scale up across Africa. Orda describes itself as a cloud-based restaurant operating system crafted for African chefs and food business owners.
The round was led by LoftyInc Capital, and saw participation from other investors such as Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Oxford Seed Fund, DFS Labs, amongst others. Angel investors that participated as well include Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia and Ademola Adesina.
Orda’s market is in the Africa restaurant industry wherein a lot of small restaurants make use of offline ways to produce receipts and make reconciliations; Orda aims to provide an alternate means of managing food businesses. “There are two kinds of restaurants where the majority of our focus is on — the bukkas [local restaurants] and the small restaurants, for instance,” Orda co-founder and CEO, Guy Futi, said.
The startup, founded in 2020, helps restaurants to manage their business processes online, through integrating local payments, logistics, inventory management as well as business analytics. Restaurants on the platform are also enabled to accept and process orders from food delivery platforms like Jumia Food, Bolt Food; as well as social media channels such as WhatsApp.
Futi expressed that the adoption from restaurants in its current markets —Nigeria and Kenya— has been “very seamless” and that the software doubles its growth rate every three weeks.
As of now, Orda charges restaurants between N2,500 ($5) to N30,000 ($50) on a monthly basis to access its software. Orda plans to build financial products, and dive into processing payments for restaurants. The startup is further working on expanding into South Africa by the end of 2022.
Speaking on the investment, Idris Ayo 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.”
