Nigerian Startup Kippa Raises $3.2 Million For An Improvement In Bookkeeping Practices Of African Small-Scale Businesses

Sometimes small businesses face the challenge of learning how to develop effective bookkeeping practices. This obstacle could lead to disrupted cash flow and a failure to meet the financial obligations of one’s business.

Looking to resolve this issue in Nigeria is the startup Kippa, which markets itself as the country’s simplest accounting software. Founded by Kennedy Ekezie alongside Duke Ekezie and Jephthah Uche in February 2021, the application is designed to help small business owners create a bookkeeping system that will help them “recover debts 3x faster,” TechCrunch reports.

According to Kippa, a stand-out feature on its application is customers who have not made payments can not only be tracked, but they will receive an automated reminder message for the business owner to recover debts. In addition, businesses can manage inventory, track daily cash flow and expenses, create invoices and generate receipts.

“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,” said CEO and co-founder Kennedy Ekezie, the outlet reports. “And we do have a unique opportunity to help them accept online digital payments, to provide them with working capital, digital savings and plug them into the financial ecosystem.”

Now, Kippa will continue to aid small businesses with the help of a $3.2 million pre-seed round led by Berlin-based venture capital firm Target Global. Other participating investors included Entrée Capital, Alter Global, and Rally Cap Ventures. In addition, various angel investors wanted to secure their investment with Kippa such as 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.

The finance app plans to use the funds from the ambitious pre-seed round to revamp its products, expand its team, tap into financial services and expand its merchant base. Already, TechCrunch reports the startup has grown nearly 126 percent “month-by-month” since June and currently houses 130,000 small businesses. In addition, $300 million has been recorded by the bookkeeping and finance app during the past five months.

Currently, the application is free for small businesses. However, the company plans to pivot and pipeline credit and additional financial services to generate revenue back to the company through commission fees or interests from lending or working capital. This will be a groundbreaking venture for the small businesses in Nigeria whose transactions are primarily cash-based, and Kippa believes establishing working capital or credit will resolve most of the issues found within their businesses.

“What we saw was a lot of them operating very manually using the ledgers, spending one hour or more at the end of the day balancing their books, making mistakes, canceling out, complaining of their records being incomplete,” said Ekezie, according to TechCrunch. And we saw a bigger problem — which is the biggest problem small businesses face — the lack of access to credit or financing to run properly. So we thought that was an interesting enough problem to solve.”