Jephtah ChidozieUche is the co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kippa, a FinTech start-up that focuses on offering digital accounting/financial solutions to small and medium businesses in Africa.
In addition to creating/crafting amazing user experiences, developing technological strategies, he is also passionate about structuring teams and scaling them.
Jephtah has won awards that honour and reflect his dedication with his unusual yet innovative approach to leveraging cutting edge technologies at the nexus of computing and human needs, including an award for best application of Machine Learning in 2018 held at UnivelCity & IFTF Machine Learning and A.I hackathon in Nigeria.
SKILLS
Startup Founder Software Architecture Product StrategyKippa works as a simple app where small business owners can 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.
AREA OF FOCUS
Accounting Financial Services Small and Medium Businesses
INDUSTRY
Financial ServicesKippa raises $3.2 million pre-seed fund to enable small businesses in AfricaKippa, a Nigerian fintech startup has raised $3.2 million pre-seed fund in a round led by Target Global with participation from Entrée Capital, Alter Global and Rally Cap Ventures.
Founded in June 2021, Kippa’s goal is to help Nigerian businesses be more sustainable by solving the accounting and bookkeeping challenges. It mobile app allows users to record sales and expenses, create and send invoices, manage inventory, recover debts and track the profit of their business per time.
In Nigeria, 96% of the nation’s total businesses are micro, small and medium scale enterprises (MSMEs), they accounted for over half of the GDP in 2020. Meanwhile, in Africa, MSMEs make more than $3.5 trillion transactions annually, with over 90% in cash.
Amidst this figures, most business owners in Nigeria find it extremely complicated to manage their finances and often time spend hours navigating manual bookkeeping and tracking accounts. Kippa is leveraging digital tools to enable small business that lack access to professional accountants to perform accounting and bookkeeping efficiently, through product simplicity to understand customer problems but also prioritizes building technology with the users first in mind.
Jephtah Chidozie Uche, Co-Founder and CTO – Kippa said, “We [Kippa] only build features that our users want and need. The engineering team liaises with the customer success team to build features that solve real problems for our users”.
The Co-Founders were inspired after stumbling on the problem of manual bookkeeping while travelling across Nigeria in search of a way to change the lives of Nigerians using technology. With strong expertise in building products for the African market and background from micro merchant families, the founding team is intimately familiar with the industry.
Even though the fintech startup did not disclose the exact transaction volume recorded on the app, We learnt that since April, over $300 million has been recorded by over 130,000 registered merchants across the 36 states in Nigeria that use Kippa.
According to Duke Ekezie, the CGO and co-founder, the growth for the company is measured by the number of weekly active users on the App; “we are motivated by how many merchants use the product every week to solve problems and not by how many users we get into the top funnel”, Ekezie stated.
With Kippa’s raise being one of the largest in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, Lina Chong, the Target Global’s investment director said, “[this] investment in Kippa will enable it to grow and be the first-choice financial management solution for small businesses in Africa.”
Currently, Kippa has over 30 staff from top technology and finance companies around the world. Driven by using a world-class team to build a world-class product, With this fundraise, the company intends to hire more experienced professionals and expand into other services — especially credit opportunities for merchants.
Some of Kippa’s prominent angel investors include; Sriram Krishnan, Raffael Johnen — CEO, Auxmoney, Babs Ogundeyi — CEO, Kuda, Kyane Kassiri, Edward Suh — Managing Partner at Goodwater Capital, Sajid Rahman and Uche Pedro — CEO, Bella Naija.
– Culled from Forbes and Benjamindada.com
