Nigeria’s Kippa bags $3.2 million pre seed round

Nigeria’s Kippa gets $3.2M pre-seed for its small business finance management app

Kippa, a startup that aims to digitize the book keeping process of SMEs has joined the growing list of startups to have received funding in this space (fintechs for SMEs).

Kippa’s $3.2 million pre-seed round comes less than a year after launching in June this year.

Why is this important?

Given the fact that Kippa’s pre-seed round is the fourth funding round for Fintechs for SMEs in the space of two months. It shows that investors are really bullish in this space.

Kippa’s pre-seed round is one of the largest in Nigeria and Sub Saharan Africa. What makes it even more interesting is that the startup was able to achieve this in less than a year since it launched.

Leading the round is Berlin-based VC Target Global. Entrée Capital, Alter Global and Rally Cap Ventures are the other participating VCs.

A number of angel investors — Babs Ogundeyi, Kuda CEO; Sriram Krishnan, an investor in Khatabook; Raffael Johnen, Auxmoney CEO; Chris Bouwer; Kyane Kassiri; Edward Suh of Goodwater Capital; and Sajid Rahman — invested in the startup.

Founded in February this year by Kennedy Ekezie, along with co-founders Duke Ekezie and Jephthah Uche, Kippa’s core product revolves around providing a platform for small business owners to keep track of their daily income and expense transactions, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory and generally monitor how their businesses ebb and flow over time.

“For us, what we do is we have such a unique opportunity to provide financial services to users. For most of them, Kippa is the first B2B SaaS app that they’re using.” Kippa’s CEO Kennedy Ekezie

The startup claims to have grown on average of 126% month-on-month since launching in June. With over 130,000 active businesses, ranging from small kiosks and street corner shops to local food vendors and high-end merchants using the app,Kippa claims to have recorded more than $300 million in the past five months.

Kippa will be looking to invest its latest war chest in growing its merchant base, improving its product, scaling the team, and venturing into financial services.