Many African restaurants are stuck using low-tech means for accounting – often with pen and paper, sometimes without access to payment machines. Orda, a Nigeria-based food tech platform, announced that it had raised $3.4 million dollars in seed investment to help build a cloud-based operating system for restaurants. Along with a $1.1 million dollar investment in pre-seed funding raised this January, the total amount raised for the Orda project so far is $4.5 million dollars.
Cloud-Based Restaurant Management
Orda seeks to sell the operating system to small and medium-sized restaurants which do not have the cash or expertise to buy a full legacy payment system. These restaurants traditionally rely on staff performing manual calculations for daily tasks like inventory management. Orda’s operating system hosts these parts of the business online, so separate locations can easily update their stock take without having to communicate manually between stores. By integrating stock, accounting, payments, and kitchen IoT systems, Orda seeks to centralize the business of running a restaurant into a single subscription.
This model has already found success in Nigeria and Kenya, where over 600 vendors have signed up for a pilot scheme from the startup. Orda intends to serve over 1000 locations by the end of Q1 2023, potentially expanding into other African markets where the need for a robust low-connectivity cloud solution is apparent.
In areas where internet connection is not always guaranteed, the Orda team seeks to enable as much offline functionality as possible, which is then synced with the rest of the cloud when a location comes back online. That way, businesses can keep on running using Orda with minimal disruption.
A Plan For Future Growth
Orda has also improved its management team, bringing on Afua Ahwoi from Goldman Sachs to be head of operations and strategy. Joining him is Modesola Osasomi, from Barclays Bank, who will perform duties as head of growth. Orda joins other startups in the African food market seeing to disrupt traditional vending strategies, such as Vendease, TopUp Mama, Chowdeck, Foodcourt, Glovo, and Jumia Food.
Each of these companies is digitizing part of the traditional food chain that powers African restaurants as they enter the digital age. Western companies such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo have been slow to find success in the African market, and local companies are quickly picking up the slack. Cloud-based accounting software like Orda could expand in the future to also cover gig-economy delivery roles traditionally left to companies like Uber if they get big enough.
Highly Connected For The Future
Integration with existing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is crucial when building a presence in Africa. Orda allows restaurant owners to take advantage of existing app install bases from the most popular apps as inbound payment channels, reducing the need for specialized apps to integrate with the Orda ecosystem.
These payments are captured by a full business analytics platform that allows users to see real-time store performance and extract the correct metrics that measure store growth, empowering business owners to grow beyond local stores and into franchises.
Orda’s payment model is also quite flexible. They currently offer three plans, N1,000, N5,000, and N20,000 a month options, which all come with different access levels to parts of the Orda platform ranging from business intelligence, food aggregation integration, and omnichannel payment integration, in addition to the default point of service and microsite features that come with Orda by default.
In the coming months, Orda expects to expand its services to more fully cover payment channels, such as employee payment, loans, stock debt, and long-term financial planning integration with business insight software. In the future, Orda may be the only solution African vendors need to run a fully-fledged restaurant empire without needing expensive legacy point-of-service software and terminals. Orda is platform agnostic, and runs wherever you can get a browser and an internet connection.
