Our Investment in Okra
By Misha Gordon-Rowe, Investor at Susa Ventures
Susa Ventures is excited to announce our lead investment in Okra, an open finance fintech infrastructure company in Lagos, Nigeria. We’re investing alongside TLcom, the leading VC firm in Sub-Saharan Africa and Accenture, a global leader in systems integration, data, and cloud infrastructure. And we’re thrilled to welcome Fara and David to the Susa Family.
We’ve been investing in Nigerian start-ups at Susa since our first fund. Our first investment was in Andela, a company that has actually trained some of Okra’s talented early engineers. Clearly, we’re excited about the huge opportunity to build infrastructure and expand financial opportunity to Sub-Saharan Africa’s 1.1B consumers, starting in Nigeria. Nigeria has 200M people and is expected to grow to 300M within 15 years. It’s a young country: the median Nigerian is 18-years-old. It’s a growing financial hub for the region; the number of active bank accounts grew 40% in 2020 alone. And it has one of the fastest growing developer communities.
This year’s global pandemic brought the digitization of financial services forward by 5+ years, as banking and commerce could no longer be carried out in-person. Meanwhile, there’s an irreversible global shift toward open finance and consumer ownership of their financial data.
Though financial services are being digitized, Africa is still missing a frictionless bridge between applications and customers’ financial data. This makes simple tasks like onboarding, full financial and credit analysis, and payments a tedious and fragmented process.
Okra is stepping in to fill the gap. Their open finance API allows users to connect their bank accounts and permission real-time financial data to an app or financial service. Today, developers and businesses are using Okra to build full end-to-end digital services like lending, personal financial management tools, real estate credit assessments, and SMB banking products.
Okra is on a tear. Today they have 100s of customers building on its API — including some of the largest banks, digital wallets, insurance companies, government agencies and fintech lenders, as well as non-financial companies that leverage them for customer onboarding and more.
And there’s no better or more technical team for the challenge. Fara is an engineer and talented repeat entrepreneur who wrote much of the code architecture herself. She is customer focused and is deeply technical. She leads by example and is highly respected by the engineering community. David is an impressive thesis driven entrepreneur that deeply understands the digital financial services markets and leads business development and strategy. He focuses on first principles and is very thoughtful about the future of banking and financial services in emerging markets.
We’re thrilled to partner with Okra as they build tools to accelerate the pace of fintech innovation and financial inclusion across the African continent. We witnessed how Plaid enabled the explosion of fintech apps in the US — like our portfolio company Robinhood — and believe Okra will underpin a similar explosion of development serving consumers and SMBs across Africa.
Okra is hiring aggressively for remote and Lagos-based positions across engineering, product, design, customer success, and business development. More here on their open positions.
