A newly funded Nigerian company called Orda aspires to become the “Toast of Africa.” That’s Toast as in the American restaurant point of sale software powerhouse. Not as in “the toast of the town.”
Orda just raised a $1.1 million pre-seed to scale up its restaurant POS across the African continent. LoftyInc Capital led the round. Also chipping in are Techstars Boulder, Magic Fund, Hustle Fund, Norrsken Foundation, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Oxford Seed Fund, Enza Capital, Agrolay Advisors. Plus angel investors such as Buycoins’ Ire Aderinokun, Jesse Ovia, and Ademola Adesina.
Orda was founded in 2020 as StarKitchens and later rebranded as Orda. Its core offering is a cloud-based POS system.
The company also offers a platform for omnichannel ordering (e.g., from multiple channels like WhatsApp, Jumia Food, and so on), plus a customizable microsite for its restaurant customers. And finally, Orda provides restaurants with their own branded mobile app.
As a restaurant management system, Orda also offers restaurants a data stream that helps them operate more efficiently, for example by managing inventory efficiently so they are neither overstocked nor running out of supplies too quickly. For restaurants, which operate on notoriously thin margins, efficiency is the key to growth.
Orda has keyed in on small independent restaurants as its primary target.
Larger restaurants and multi-location chains tend to operate on legacy POS systems, internally developed systems, or they may use an international POS system like Canada’s Lightspeed. Toast, which went public last year, serves 40,000 locations in the United States.
Orda’s biggest competition is the same as for any cloud-based software company serving the SMME market. Pen and paper. The trick isn’t getting them to switch from another software company. It’s getting them to begin using software in the first place.
“There are two kinds of restaurants where the majority of our focus is on — the bukkas [local restaurants] and the small restaurants, for instance,” Orda co-founder and CEO Guy Futi recently told TechCrunch.
The question is, can enough small African restaurants be convinced that their investment in software, however modest, will more than pay for itself in improved efficiency, which in turn, enables a business to grow? If the answer is yes, Orda has a massive opportunity. And it will take a lot more than $1.1 million to make it happen. if Orda gets any momentum, expect a Series A this year.