Kippa, a financial management and payments platform for Nigerian small businesses founded in June 2021 by Kennedy Ekezie-Joseph, Duke Ekezie, and Jephthah Uche, announced a new funding round of $8.4 million. Kippa’s total fundraising amount now stands at $11 million after the company announced a $3.2 million pre-seed fundraise from Target Global and other investors last November.
Kippa welcomed new global investors in this recent fundraise, 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 of Lazada), VentureSouq, Horizon Partners, and Vibe Capital.
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The platform began as a finance management app that allows small business owners to track their daily income and expense transactions, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory, and generally monitor how their businesses perform over time.
Kippa is one of many financial management platforms, including OZÉ, Bumpa, and Prospa, that aim to serve the 50 million SMEs in Nigeria as well as a wider market in sub-Saharan Africa. The company revealed last week that, like other players in agency banking TeamApt and OPay, it had received a Super-Agent license from Nigeria’s top bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
With the license, Kippa platform merchants can act as agents and provide financial services such as cash withdrawals and deposits, bank account opening, bill and utility payments, and insurance to individual customers who visit their small shops on a regular basis to make everyday purchases.
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Kippa has hired ex-regulators and former senior executives from top fintech startups such as OPay, BharatPe, Khatabook, TeamApt, OKCredit, NIBSS, and Unified Payments in the last year.
“What this license does is it allows us to empower all of our customers with tools and infrastructure to not just accept payments, but to start offering financial services to their end customers,” Ekezie-Joseph previously told TechCabal. “It gives us the opportunity to integrate with national switches and provide business-to-business, platform, and services to other fintech.”