KudiGo, a Ghanaian fintech & big data startup that is innovating around informal retail, has today announced that it raised a $450,000 seed round.
Newly launched accelerator and incubator - Johannesburg-based Founders Factory Africa - led the round which also saw participation from three angel investors. According to KudiGo, the three undisclosed angel investors include a Ghanaian, an American & a Nigerian.
Per KudiGo's press release, the startup - which is less than two years old - recently hit a milestone of 1,000 businesses using its platform in Ghana and Nigeria where it currently has operations.
According to Kingsley Bright Ahedor, the CEO and Co-founder, KudiGo will use the seed funds to double down on delivering value for the existing KudiGo users as well as onboarding more.
“Having successfully closed this initial investment round, we are focused on achieving our year-end target of 5,000 businesses on our platform," he pointed out. Adding that "[we are also looking to] achieve a 40% business growth for these businesses by using our solutions".
The startup will also roll out its credit referencing and micro-lending modules. Kingsley pointed out that these offerings will be "specifically targeted at users of our platform in partnership with our strategic partners and investors”.
Founded in 2017 by Kingsley Bright Ahedor, Gideon Boateng and Kingsley Abrokwah, KudiGo, refers to itself as an "end to end retail POS designed for micro SMEs in sub-Saharan Africa". In November last year, the startup announced a strategic partnership with Nigerian fintech - Interswitch Group - to enable it process payments.
The startup's offering to retailers is dubbed KudiGo StoreFront - which is an all-in-one retail management system with analytics and comes with SageOne integration- an online accounting software with dashboards and graphs that retailers can access any time.
The KudiGo seed funding announcement comes on the back of Founders Factory Africa announcing the list of five fintech startups that it selected for its inaugural accelerator - of which KudiGo is a part of. It was also among the 30 startups that were chosen to take part in Demo Africa 2017.
The other four startups that Founders Factory Africa selected for their accelerator include Schoolable (Nigeria), Digest Africa (Uganda), LipaLater (Kenya) and EazyHire (Nigeria). Each of the five startups received a $40,000 cash investment as well as a $280,000 investment in services.