Okra, the once-promising fintech startup behind Africa’s entrance into open banking, has shut down operations.
Its cloud infrastructure product, Nebula, is also no more. And with both gone, one of the continent’s most ambitious tech stories has come to a quiet and unexpected end.
The company, which raised over $16 million from global investors, officially ceased operations in May 2025. Fara Ashiru Jituboh, the co-founder and former CEO/CTO, confirmed the closure in a statement to Techpoint Africa:
“The company made the decision to wind down operations in May. It was an incredible journey; we built impactful technology, worked with some of the biggest brands across the continent, and helped pioneer open banking in Africa. I’m proud to have worked alongside some of the smartest and most talented people, and I’m deeply grateful for the community, customers, investors, and team who supported us over the past five years.”
Jituboh has since moved on to take up a new position as head of Engineering at the UK-based startup, Kernel, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Her exit followed a series of quiet internal changes at Okra, including the departure of her co-founder, David Peterside, in 2022. Since then, no successor was publicly named, and by mid-2025, the startup was already off the radar of most in the ecosystem.
Founded in 2019, Okra set out to do something few African startups dared; build the core infrastructure powering open finance. Its APIs enabled users to link their Nigerian bank accounts to third-party applications in real time, offering services from identity verification to income and transaction data sharing.
That initiative attracted early backing, including $1 million from TLcom Capital and a $3.5 million seed round led by Susa Ventures, eventually pushing total funding beyond $16.5 million.
But scale didn’t guarantee survival. In October 2024, in response to high foreign exchange costs that made services like AWS and Azure increasingly expensive, Okra launched Nebula, a naira-denominated cloud platform aimed at local businesses.
Designed to offer Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centres, compliant with African data regulations and billed in local currency, Nebula was intended to reduce dependence on costly international services. It was an aggressive bet on infrastructure, competing against the likes of Nobus and Layer3.
However, tech giants quickly responded by enabling local billing and slashing prices, with AWS and Microsoft reportedly cutting rates by up to 20%. With that, any price advantage Nebula hoped to offer was gone, and customer adoption remained underwhelming.
By March 2025, Jituboh publicly admitted what many in tech were privately whispering, cloud expenses had become unsustainable: salaries aside, server costs were swallowing most of Okra’s revenue.
The competitive space added further challenges. Startups such as Mono and Stitch, which raised $17.6 million and $52 million respectively, raced ahead in distribution, partnerships, and product sophistication. These rivals had deeper war chests and were able to move faster, often capturing the very market segments Okra once aimed for.
With no external capital infusion publicly announced after 2021, and an economic environment that continued to worsen, the signs were there. Few noticed.
What’s perhaps most notable is how quietly it all ended. No press release or farewell post. Just an update on LinkedIn and a quote to a reporter. For a company that once called itself the “Plaid of Africa,” it was a soft landing that belied the size of its dreams.
Before founding Okra, Jituboh had worked at Canva, BMW, and JP Morgan. She returned to Nigeria to solve a problem she’d experienced first-hand, fintech apps that didn’t connect to local banks.
Okra’s solution was commendable, building the rails of open finance. And for a while, it worked. Its API usage surged by 175% in early 2020. Partnerships with platforms like Renmoney, Branch, Bamboo, and AIICO Insurance came quickly. Regulators took notice, investors followed.
But between currency depreciation, infrastructure strain, and the leadership vacuum post-2022, Okra’s speed slowly faded. The fintech space had grown more crowded and more difficult. Scaling in Africa without a deep-pocketed backer or profitable model remains a fierce challenge.
Okra’s closure repeats the fact that startups need staying power, but in Nigeria’s current economic situation, even the brightest ideas are fighting for breath.
