The sudden shutdown of Okra, once a rising star in Nigeria’s fintech landscape, has sent shockwaves through the industry. The company played a pivotal role in advancing open banking infrastructure across Nigeria, and its collapse has left many wondering how such a high-potential startup could crumble.

A Startup with Sky-High Expectations

Launched in 2020, Okra appeared to be a model success story. It had visionary leadership, support from top global investors, rapid revenue growth, and a product that was transforming digital finance across Africa.

Engineers and professionals left established companies like Google, Disney, Mastercard, and PayPal to join the company’s mission: building the foundational data rails for Africa’s financial system. The co-founders — Fara Ashiru Jituboh (engineering) and David Peterside (go-to-market and strategy) — built Okra into a dominant player providing API-based financial data access.

By 2021, the startup had raised $4.5 million in seed funding from TLCom and Susa Ventures, and its cap table included prestigious names like Dropbox’s Arash Ferdowsi, Sequoia Capital Scouts, and Accenture Ventures.

Okra’s model of charging per API call proved instantly profitable, hitting $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within its first year. In early 2022, the company closed a $12 million Series A funding round at a $92 million valuation, led by Base10 Partners.

Its technology was integrated into platforms run by major banks and fintechs such as UBA, Access Bank, Interswitch, MTN, Paga, Bamboo, and Trove. The company’s sales team, under Peterside’s leadership, was known for its highly effective execution, even winning deals over competitors with insider connections.

Behind the Curtain: Mounting Internal and External Pressure

Despite its strong public image, Okra faced growing internal friction. Peterside reportedly became disillusioned with the engineering team’s output after the Series A round, arguing that the team struggled to meet growing technical demands. As contracts poured in, the engineering side reportedly couldn’t scale fast enough — especially as the backend relied heavily on screen scraping, a fragile solution.

This imbalance between the commercial and technical arms of the business eventually led to Peterside’s departure in October 2022, a significant turning point in the company’s decline.

Externally, the devaluation of the naira and Nigeria’s challenging economic conditions put immense strain on the business model. In response, CEO Ashiru attempted to pivot toward a cloud infrastructure product called Nebula, optimized for African needs and billed in local currency. Unfortunately, the move didn’t gain enough traction to offset revenue losses.

By mid-2025, with revenues dwindling and operations unsustainable, Okra ceased operations, offering employees six months’ severance pay — a rare and commendable gesture in the tech world.

A Familiar Story in African Tech

Okra’s downfall is part of a broader pattern of high-profile African tech failures:

• Sendy, a Kenyan logistics startup that raised $20M, shut down in 2022 after failed pivots.
• 54gene, once a biotech darling of Nigerian tech, collapsed in 2023 following internal mismanagement.
• Thepeer, a Nigerian fintech startup, folded in 2024 after struggling to achieve product-market fit and scale adoption.
• Kune Food, a food delivery startup in Kenya, shut down less than a year after raising $1M, citing high burn rates and overhead.

Is There Life After Shutdown?

Despite the closure, co-founder Fara Ashiru hasn’t entirely walked away from the Okra vision. While she’s since taken on a role as Head of Engineering at UK-based startup Kernel, her recent LinkedIn post suggested that Okra’s shutdown was limited to the Nebula cloud business, not the entire company.

“Following a period of major internal transitions, the company is refocusing on its core strengths in payments infrastructure – streamlining operations to drive growth and long-term sustainability,” the statement read.

What Experts Are Saying

Industry observers believe Okra’s journey, while ending prematurely, set the stage for future innovation.

Bashir Are, CEO of the Lagos State Lotteries & Gaming Authority, compared Okra to early 2000s U.S. companies like Digex and Exodus Communications, which pioneered cloud services before failing — making way for the rise of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Legal experts like Favour Ibe say the story highlights a recurring issue in African startups: poor legal infrastructure, including incomplete shareholder agreements and weak IP audits, which can block future funding or exits. She stressed that startup liquidity, not just fundraising, must be part of early planning.

Meanwhile, Paul Ogunedo, CEO of AWI Energies, said that Okra’s story is not one of failure but of brave innovation.

“They were ambitious. And they opened the door for others. In Africa’s tech ecosystem, we must learn to honour the pioneers, even when they don’t make it to the finish line,” he said.

He added that Okra’s pivot to cloud was ill-timed given the local economic conditions, especially the rapidly weakening naira, which made the infrastructure costs unsustainable.

Okra’s story is a mix of brilliance and breakdown, a visionary startup that helped pioneer open finance in Africa, only to be brought down by internal misalignments and external headwinds. While its shutdown was a blow to the ecosystem, its impact lives on in the form of the conversations, technologies, and opportunities it helped create.

In the fast-moving world of African tech, pioneers may stumble, but they often lay the groundwork for the successes of tomorrow.