The collapse of Okra didn’t come as a shock to those attuned to the subtleties of startup economics. While the public narrative painted a picture of bold ambition and exponential growth, a closer inspection of its strategic direction and financial footprint tells a different story — one of structural fragility from the moment of its Series A.
This report, drawing from publicly available data and informed sources familiar with Okra’s inner workings, offers a critical post-mortem of a fintech once hailed as Africa’s API powerhouse.
Okra raised an impressive $16.5 million across three funding rounds: a $1 million pre-seed from TLcom Capital, a $3.5 million seed round led by Susa Ventures, and a $12 million Series A from Base10 Partners. Despite this strong capital inflow, the company’s foundational business model undermined its long-term sustainability.
At its core, Okra’s model was built on charging developers per API call — every instance a third-party app needed to access user banking data. While usage-based pricing is common in tech, it proved problematic in the financial services sector. As fintech analyst Fredrick Favour observed, “The value of an API isn’t the data itself. It’s what the data enables. If I’m a lender, I don’t care how many times I hit your API. I care about how many customers I can approve with confidence.”
This misalignment between value delivery and revenue generation created a fundamental disconnect. Clients weren’t incentivized to make repeated API calls, nor was their success tied to Okra’s pricing mechanism. In essence, Okra was monetizing frequency rather than outcomes — a strategy ill-suited to the trust- and performance-driven world of financial technology.
Okra was selling access, but its clients cared about outcomes. A lender using Okra to verify a customer’s income doesn’t want to pay for every data request; they want to pay for a successful loan application. This misalignment meant that as Okra’s clients grew, they would inevitably see Okra as a cost center to be minimized, not a partner in their success. This fundamental flaw made profitability a perpetually receding horizon. This is despite the 175% usage surge within a month in 2020.
This flawed model was compounded by a fatal strategic choice. To truly scale, an infrastructure company like Okra needed to be deeply embedded in the systems its clients already used. This means partnerships with core banking platforms, loan origination software, and even government ID systems. TeamApt, locally could have been a right call. Oracle’s flexcube, Plaid, Finnacle, SBS platform, which a number of Nigerian commercial banks use could have also been leveraged on. The goal is to become an invisible, indispensable feature.
Instead, Okra tried to own the entire relationship. This approach is slower and more expensive. As one analyst put it, “Clever businesses understand that sometimes the fastest path to scale is through someone else’s distribution.” By trying to go it alone, Okra slowed its own growth and increased its customer acquisition costs exponentially.
The financial pressure was immense. Okra was operating with a cost structure that mirrored a Silicon Valley firm, paying for top engineering talent, cloud services like AWS, and marketing. But its revenue was grounded in African reality. This is a common trap. As Kingsley Uyi Idehen, a technology executive, has argued, startup funding numbers in Africa don’t carry the same weight as they do elsewhere. “One can safely apply a 10x impact multiplier for proper perspective,” he stated, highlighting the immense operational friction.
The money simply doesn’t go as far. When a startup like Okra raises $12 million, the costs of unreliable power, internet, and navigating bureaucracy can eat into that capital far more quickly than investors realize. This forces a desperate search for revenue, which likely fueled the ill-fated pivot to “Nebula.”
An analysis of Okra’s funding journey reveals a classic story of escalating pressure. The initial $1 million pre-seed from TLcom was for building the product and finding early believers. The subsequent $3.5 million seed round from Susa Ventures came with the expectation of demonstrating growth—more developers, more API calls. This is likely where the flawed “pay-per-call” model became entrenched, as it provided a simple, albeit vanity, metric for growth.
The final, and largest, round of $12 million from Base10 Partners in late 2023 was the turning point. This was Series A capital, money meant for aggressive scaling. At this stage, investors weren’t just looking for usage, they were looking for a clear path to profitability. But with a flawed model, the path wasn’t there.
Public records are scarce, but a plausible reconstruction of their finances paints a grim picture. With a team of around 80 employees, many of them highly paid engineers, monthly salary costs could have easily been in the range of $250,000. Add to that cloud service costs, marketing, and the uniquely high operational expenses in Nigeria (diesel, private security, logistics), and the company’s monthly burn rate was likely approaching $300,000 even before its major pivot.
The launch of Nebula would have been like pouring gasoline on that fire. Developing a cloud infrastructure platform, marketing it, and navigating its complex regulations would have required a massive, immediate cash outlay, likely doubling their burn rate for at least two quarters. The $12 million, which might have provided a 24-month runway for the core business, was likely exhausted in less than a year. The public narrative of ambitious expansion was inconsistent with the internal reality of a business desperately searching for a viable financial model.
There were other paths. The company could have aggressively pre-negotiated AWS credits for its clients to lower their costs, built on-device caching to reduce expensive cloud operations, or even developed an offline-first adapter for its API. These technical solutions, however, were seemingly ignored in the pursuit of a grander, but ultimately flawed, vision.
The greatest tragedy is the timing. Nigeria’s Open Banking regulations are set to become fully operational in August 2025. This policy will mandate that banks allow customers to share their financial data with third-party providers. Okra was perfectly positioned to be the dominant player in this new era. It had the brand, the technology, and the head start. But by the time the starting gun fired, Okra had already run itself off the course.
The failure leaves a bitter taste and reinforces a dangerous narrative. As Idehen warned, “If these failures aren’t evaluated transparently, they risk setting Nigeria (and the continent at large) back in terms of future investment.” When $16.5 million vanishes with little public accounting, it sends a signal to global investors that the region is too risky. It creates a cloud of suspicion that unfairly shadows the next generation of hardworking founders.
The unraveling of Okra was not due to a single cause. It was a perfect storm of a flawed pricing model, a mistaken distribution strategy, and the immense pressure of high costs in a challenging market. It serves as a stark lesson that in the world of startups, a great idea and a full bank account are no guarantee of success. Strategy, focus, and a deep understanding of your market are the things that truly matter.
