Orda: the OS for Africa's restaurants

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Biography

Guy Futi is the co-founder of Orda, a Nigerian startup building the operating system for the continent’s restaurants. Orda offers a full-suite of products including point-of-sale (POS), inventory management, credit and more. Orda has raised over $4M to date. 

Orda has onboarded around 1,500 restaurants, alongside large franchise chains such as KFC Nigeria and Coldstone Creamery. 

Prior to Orda, Guy spent two years working at Jumia, known as “Africa’s Amazon”. Guy holds a masters from Harvard and is pursuing a PhD from Oxford. 

What did you learn at Jumia that led to Orda’s creation?

Jumia was a fantastic school. I experienced the operational realities of scaling a tech company in Africa. The impact I saw tech could have on the continent still fuels me today. 

Within Jumia’s e-commerce suite was a food-delivery service (Jumia Foods, since closed). For many of the restaurants we served, Jumia was the first piece of technology they integrated into their business. The need for digital tools catered to Africa’s restaurants became blatantly clear. 

Jumia didn’t have the bandwidth to build those tools so I decided to do so myself. 

What did your MVP look like and how did you muster traction?

We started building software to help restaurants reconcile their transactions and manage their inventory virtually, rather than with pen and paper. Our website was bad, our tech was bad but we signed our first couple of clients with that value proposition. 

What are Orda’s 3 most important features today?

The first is what we started with, our restaurant operating system. This helps restaurants manage their inventory, accept online orders, track their analytics…

The second is our point-of-sale (POS) solutions, which help restaurants process online/card payments. We initially developed a physical POS solution ourselves but pivoted to a virtual version (more on that later).

The third is our lending product, via which restaurants can access working capital loans based on their revenue. 

What does your client base look like today and how is it evolving?

Our typical client is a restaurant making around $70,000/year, in an urban area, which is busy for lunch and dinner and is owned by a couple for whom cooking is a passion. 

That client persona used to make up the vast majority of our clients. We’re now pushing to onboard more franchises: we’ve signed KFC Nigeria, EAT’N’GO (which operates ColdStone and Pinkberry in Nigeria) among others.

We’ve built a proper sales team for the franchise part but a lot of the mom-and-pop restaurant leads are inbound. Word of mouth is still our number 1 driver of business. 

What are other effective growth levers so far?

Orda’s software enables restaurants to accept online orders from all food-delivery apps. This is advantageous for apps like Glovo: instead of manually onboarding restaurants onto an operating system themselves, they know restaurants using Orda are able to process their orders. Platforms like Glovo are thus incentivized to promote our product to the restaurants they serve. 

From Orda’s website

What’s your biggest challenge, unit-economics speaking?

I think we’ve solved it (at least until the next challenge inevitably comes around).

We used to sell physical POS devices to restaurants. These were expensive to produce and introduced supply-chain complexities we weren’t equipped to handle as a software-first business. The economic equation for selling this POS hardware made less and less sense. We’ve pivoted to coding the software on the POS devices that banks are now building. 

We don’t produce any more in-house hardware. 

What’s your thorniest operational challenge?

Maintaining stellar customer service as we grow is difficult. You want to give each customer a unique, personalized and world-class experience but that doesn’t always scale. Intelligently integrating AI into our customer service is one way we’re solving this. 

How does Orda make money?

We have multiple revenue streams. 

The first is subscriptions, akin to a SaaS, where restaurants pay us a fee to use our operating system.

The second is the cut we take on the payments we process, via our POS systems. 

The third are custom software integrations we make for clients, like helping banks code their POS software, for example. 

The fourth is the revenue we make from our lending product.

How does Orda’s lending product work?