Legacy systems and point-of-sale providers are used by most large restaurant chains in Africa. Smaller restaurants, which make up the biggest segment of this $50 billion industry, stick with running operations manually because of the high cost of these systems.
Orda is a Nigerian food tech platform that provides a cloud-based restaurant operating system to solve these issues for small, independent restaurants. The two-year-old startup raised more than one million dollars in pre-seed funding in January.
The majority of its clients are small and medium-sized eateries. Offline methods, including pen and paper, are typically used by restaurants with limited access to technology. Businesses that use Orda's operating system can handle these parts of their business online, as well as get access to other features, such as kitchen display systems, accounting software and integrations with food aggregations.
Guy Futi said in an interview that the company takes an interesting approach to software. The process of those who write things in hand is simplified by our software.
According to Futi, Orda has seen tremendous adoption among small restaurants in its two markets, Nigeria and Kenya. The number of vendors it has pulled in and the pace at which the food tech onboarded them is his conviction.
Orda plans to serve more than 1,000 restaurants by the end of the first quarter of 2022. Orda's transactions have gone up as well. It has increased its GMV by 30% month-on-month and now processes over 50,000 orders a week. Futi said that they were seeing fast-paced growth in Nigeria andKenya with high retention rates.
The Orda pricing model allows restaurants to choose between three payment plans, which include N1,000, N5,000 and N20,000. According to Futi, revenue grew 30% month-on- month.
Nigerian restaurant management platform Orda gets $1.1M, wants to be the Toast of Africa
Building solutions for these African restaurants has come with some constraints. Orda had to modify its cloud-based solution to work offline and allow restaurants to log data when internet access is poor.
Orda plans to add more functions to the platform as it looks to power lending and payments for its customers. According to Futi, the platform might begin a major roll out by the second quarter of next year.
The food tech wants to build and scale out its payments feature. Expansion of its network of restaurants and its pan-African expansion drive are other things. A head of operations and strategy and a head of growth have been added to the team.
African food tech platforms are catching the attention of investors. In addition to the aforementioned Glovo and Jumia Food, newer upstarts such as Foodcourt, which help restaurants make online deliveries, have received backing from global investors.
Futi said that it wouldn't be ideal if Orda ventured into these other categories as it would distract the startup from building software. The founder of the startup said that Sysco isn't in the same category as Toast. We will be open to collaborating with other players. Building the right software requires a lot of focus from our position.
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The round was co-led by Quona Capital. Existing investors include LoftyInc Capital, Enza Capital and Norrsken Foundation.
"When a restaurant owner moves from pen and paper to a fully automated digital platform, it's incredibly empowering." They now have insights that can help them improve their productivity and margins. Orda can have an outsized impact on small and medium-sized restaurants and their employees.
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