The capital raised will enable OkHi expand its team currently operating remotely across Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and London, with extensive employment in engineering, sales and products departments to drive consumer and B2B growth
Smart addressing verification company, OkHi, has raised a $1.5 million seed extension to accelerate its goal to tackle challenges in the sector.
The capital raised will enable OkHi expand its team currently operating remotely across Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and London, with extensive employment in sales, products and engineering departments to drive consumer and B2B growth.
The round, which brings the total seed raised by OkHi since inception to $3 million, included investors such as Chapel Hill Denham, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Flutterwave’s founder and other executives as well as EXFI, a syndicate of ex-Googlers.
Existing investors included Founders Factory Africa, Betatron and Interswitch Group. Bolaji Balogun, CEO of Chapel Hill Denham, will join OkHi’s board.
OkHi was founded by Timbo Drayson in 2014 with a vision to enable a world where anyone can leverage the OkHi innovation to access necessary services, tackling the lack of adequate addressing systems which leads to avoidable occurrences.
Since its launch, OkHi has created addresses in 54 countries and affirms to have encountered high demand from businesses in countries across the globe — Egypt, India, South America and Southeast Asia. In order to fully process its launch in the Nigerian market where it targets 1 million users within six months, the company has turned down requests from those countries for now.
OkHi’s digital infrastructure makes it possible for users including individuals, businesses, banks and fintech companies to adequately verify addresses of customers and services through the use of smartphones.
On expansion goal, OkHi targets reaching 15 more banks and fintech companies in Nigeria, who would leverage its services in coming months. The company would also diversify its customer base by extending its address verification and collection services to industries such as last-mile delivery, e-commerce, food delivery and emergency services.
