The news of Okra’s shutdown has left the Nigerian fintech industry watchers stunned, given the pivotal role the startup was playing in the open banking space in Nigeria.
Back in 2020, Okra had all the makings of a breakout African tech story: visionary founders, Silicon Valley backing, explosive revenue growth, and a product that was powering the future of finance on the continent.
While many are still wondering how such a promising firm could go under, an insider close to the company has now shed light on what really went wrong and how a once-thriving startup hailed as the “future of African fintech” became a cautionary tale.
Okra was not just another startup; it was a magnet for top-tier talent. Engineers and business leaders left cushy roles at global giants like Google, Disney, Mastercard, and PayPal to be part of the mission to build Africa’s financial data rails.
Co-founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh (engineering lead) and David Peterside (business and go-to-market lead), Okra positioned itself as the dominant API layer for financial data access in Nigeria and beyond.
By 2021, Okra had raised $4.5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds led by TLCom and Susa Ventures, respectively.
“They moved like a military unit,” one source said, recalling how Okra beat out rivals like Mono to win the InterSwitch deal despite Mono’s lead salesperson being an InterSwitch alumnus.
After the Series A close, Peterside reportedly became increasingly frustrated with the pace and quality of the engineering team’s output.
He believed the technical side of the company was lagging, and this friction between co-founders began to strain operations.
“The GTM team kept delivering contracts, but engineering just couldn’t keep up with implementation. We kept missing the final shot,” the source said.
Confirming the shutdown in a statement to the media without giving any reason, Fara Ashiru said: “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,”
Okra’s closure joins a growing list of African tech startups that have shut down after raising millions. In 2022, Kenyan logistics startup Sendy, which raised $20 million in Series B funding, shuttered operations due to a failed business pivot and market saturation.
Nigeria’s 54gene, once valued at over $150 million and backed by Y Combinator and Adjuvant Capital, also folded in 2023 amid mismanagement claims and restructuring issues.
Co-founder, Fara Ashiru, is reported to have since joined UK-based startup Kernel as Head of Engineering. According to updates on her LinkedIn profile, Ashiru transitioned into her new role in June 2025, following her departure from Okra in May, marking the end of a five-year journey.
But Ashiru is not giving up on Okra yet. In her latest LinkedIn post, she acknowledged that Okra had championed open finance and unlocked new possibilities across the fintech ecosystem in the last five years.
She suggested that Okra has only shut down its cloud services business, Nebula, as it “enters a new chapter” and now “undergoing internal restructuring with a renewed focus on scaling its payments business.”
She suggested that Okra has only shut down its cloud services business, Nebula, as it “enters a new chapter” and now “undergoing internal restructuring with a renewed focus on scaling its payments business.”
A statement shared with Naijaonpoint by the company also indicated that Okra is “exploring new options to enable the continued growth of its payments business as part of a broader strategic reset.”
“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 in part.
According to the CEO of AWI Energies, Paul Ogunedo, Okra’s story is not one of failure, but one of bold experimentation. They were early.
“They were ambitious. And they opened the door for others. In Africa’s tech ecosystem, we must learn to honor the pioneers, even when they don’t make it to the finish line. Because without them, there is no starting line,” he said.
He, however, noted that one of Okra’s missteps was its pivoting to cloud, a service, which became too expensive with Nigeria’s currency depreciation.
For the CEO of Lagos State Lotteries & Gaming Authority, Mr. Bashir Are, Okra’s failure could prepare the ground for the next big leap in Africa’s payment infrastructure.
He cited the cases of American companies, Digex and Exodus Communications, that shut down in the early 2000s as pioneers in data hosting, adding that their collapse made way for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
“Okra’s Nebula faced similar odds: FX pressure, scale constraints, fierce competition. But its vision, local cloud, billed in naira, built for African compliance, was years ahead,” he said.
Drawing lessons from Okra’s failure, Are said Nigerian startups need to hedge upfront against macro risks like forex.
A tech lawyer, Favour Ibe, said the collapse of Okra raised urgent questions about exits, legal infrastructure, and why promising African startups fail. She noted that while liquidity, not funding, is the endgame, African startups face a narrow exit window.
“Legal infrastructure compounds the issue. Messy cap tables, unfiled shareholder agreements, and weak IP audits, seen in cases like Andela’s early struggles, disrupt potential exits. Okra’s closure shows the need for legal hygiene from day one,” she said.
Okra’s abrupt exit has left a deep void in Nigeria’s open banking ecosystem. As the dominant player, it had the most stable infrastructure, the most aggressive GTM team, and the strongest regulatory alignment.
Mono, once Okra’s closest rival, has pivoted away from core open banking to focus on its consumer-facing product, OWO. Other players have either gone quiet or remained in survival mode.
“If Mono could fill the Okra gap, they would have done so by now,” one source noted bluntly.
Industry insiders are now looking toward the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which has promised to launch an open banking policy framework by August 2025.
That move could inject new life into the sector if it comes with clear rules and infrastructure support.