Moving deeper into Nigeria’s retail-tech space, on-demand delivery company Chowdeck has acquired Mira, a point-of-sale (POS) startup founded just last year by Flutterwave alumnus Ted Oladele and Paystack’s Olaseike Ibojo.
With this acquisition, value not yet disclosed, Chowdeck is no longer just a delivery company. It is becoming an infrastructure provider for the food, retail, and hospitality businesses it serves.
Mira’s technology, a suite of POS tools that include inventory management, payment processing, invoicing, and financing options, will now be integrated directly into Chowdeck’s platform.
This means that the same company that handles a vendor’s deliveries could soon manage its entire back-end operations.
Ted Oladele will take up a new role as Head of Product at Chowdeck. His co-founder, Ibojo, is stepping away from tech to take a career break after nearly a decade in the industry. Several other Mira employees will join Chowdeck’s team to build out the new business segment.
The acquisition comes at a time when Chowdeck is pursuing rapid growth. Since launching in 2021 with just 300 users, the company now claims over a million active users per month.
Its delivery fleet has also grown to more than 10,000 riders across multiple Nigerian cities and Accra, Ghana, a market it entered recently and says it’s working to be the go-to platform far quicker than it did at home.
The last-mile delivery sector in Nigeria is facing challenges. Logistics firms face razor-thin margins, poor road networks, rising fuel prices, and consumers unwilling to pay more for faster service.
Jumia Food, Bolt Food, Sendy, and Hytch have either exited or pivoted due to the hostile conditions. With investor appetite drying up, companies still in the race are being forced to rethink what they are and who they serve.
Chowdeck is doing just that. “For a long time, we’ve focused more on the customer side than on the restaurant, supermarket, and pharmacy side,” said CEO Femi Aluko. “But as we begin to expand, we’re paying deeper attention to the vendor side.”
With Mira, Chowdeck gains real-time visibility into in-store inventory and operations, a longstanding problem in the food delivery world. Customers often order items that are out of stock, leading to cancelled orders and frustration.
Delivery platforms try to solve this by placing human agents in restaurants to manually track inventory, but it’s clumsy and inefficient.
Osarumen Osamuyi, founder of the research publication Subtext, said, “The challenge is that it’s difficult to solve this problem without having a monopoly on the market because the restaurants need to be able to sell on multiple aggregators.” He adds, “Being integrated with the inventory management system is a much more elegant way of doing that.”
By plugging directly into vendors’ inventory systems, Chowdeck eliminates guesswork. Fewer cancellations, faster delivery, better user experience and for vendors, more predictability.
But it’s not just about user satisfaction. The data Mira provides gives Chowdeck a clearer picture of how vendors run their businesses, what’s selling, what’s not, when cash flow dips.
With that insight, Chowdeck can offer targeted financing or operational support, opening up a new revenue stream and strengthening vendor retention.
It’s a model that’s already been tested abroad. U.S.-based DoorDash acquired Bbot to expand into in-store dining systems. Square evolved from payments to become an all-in-one solution for SMEs, integrating e-commerce and lending.
Chowdeck is borrowing a similar playbook and adapting it to Nigeria’s food retail sector.
This also puts Chowdeck on a collision course with fintech giants like Moniepoint, which recently acquired a POS startup to deepen its own play in retail. Competition will be fierce, and the stakes are high, bthe benefits could be transformative.
From the outside, it looks like Chowdeck is building a moat by embedding itself in the operations of the businesses it serves. This makes it harder for rivals to poach its vendors and gives Chowdeck control over a larger part of the value chain. It’s no longer just moving food, it’s powering the business behind the food.
Expanding into the fintech layer brings new regulatory checks. Scaling a POS business in Nigeria demands more support infrastructure, customer service, and technical capacity, all of which cost money.
There’s also the question of team dynamics and integration. Samuel Frank, an analyst at Sahara Impact Ventures, warns: “Acquisitions can lead to higher operational costs, especially with staffing. It’s not always clear how teams will merge or how fast the value will materialise.”
The company already has a partnership with Chicken Republic and has experimented with loyalty programmes and discount subscriptions. It’s also working with cloud kitchens and virtual brands to increase profit margins.
The food delivery market in Nigeria is expected to hit $14.41 billion by the end of 2025. Urbanisation is speeding up, and demand for convenience is rising. If Chowdeck can combine speed, affordability, operational support, and in-store accuracy, it might take over.
