When we talk about Nigerians making giant strides in the tech space, Kennedy Ekezie Joseph is one name you’ll find on the list. From becoming a Point Man for one year to the world’s most valuable startup, TikTok’s successful breakthrough in Africa, he has since continued to put his best foot forward in the advancements of start-ups that make living better for Africans. In a recent interview with How We Made It In Africa, the 23-year-old tech-savvy Nigerian tells the story behind his latest startup, Kippa, a bookkeeping and finance app he co-founded with Duke Ekezie (his brother) and Jephthah Uche in February 2021.
Ekezie-Joseph narrated that his inspiration to start Kippa stemmed from a tender age, while he watched his father’s business go down the drain due to inefficiency in tracking finances. “My dad had a small business around when I was born, which he lost. And so for me, it really means a lot to build for a segment that I feel very intimately familiar with,” he said.
Kippa is a bookkeeping mobile-friendly app that takes the transaction/record-keeping burden from small businesses. It enables tracking daily income, expense transactions, issuing invoices, providing receipts to their customers, and creating marketing materials like business cards. It also keeps a record of debtors, this way, business owners can easily trace discrepancies in figures.
Barely 9 months after launch, Kippa generated $3.2 million in pre-seed funding, only a few start-ups are this lucky. Also more significantly, a progressive 280,000 SMEs in Nigeria are registered on the app. According to Ekezie-Joseph, the goal in the next 5-10 years is to cover a lot more out of the 47 million merchants existing in Nigeria by building out new features, by launching new product lines.
“Traditionally, SMEs have been laggers when it comes to the adoption of digital technology. What we’ve seen is digital technology has changed very many other industries – healthcare, transport – but the way businesses are run and the overall back-office operations are still very manual, they’ve really not changed since the 60s,” he noted.
“So what we’re trying to do here is unite the tailwind of the deep penetration of the internet that is continuing to grow across the continent and the smartphone penetration. So by 2025, Nigeria alone will contribute 4% of total new smartphone users in the world.”
Currently, another round of fundraising is planned to scale Kippa’s operations. “So we will be talking to investors over the next couple of months. And one of the big things we believe in is building relationships early and taking time to identify the right partners to work with. So if we do meet investors who are the right fit, we’ll be able to work with them,” he said.
