Orda Found Its Home

There is a feeling I have never been able to fully describe. You walk into a restaurant you have never been to — maybe you found it on your way somewhere, maybe you just followed your nose — and you notice it. The green interface on the tablet at the counter. The Orda screen.

Orda has been acquired by Moniepoint Group.

I have spent the last four years at Orda as a Co-Founder and the product lead. I am still sitting with that sentence. Four years of roadmaps, customer calls, debates about what to build next, and watching a product become real infrastructure for businesses that are feeding people across Nigeria and Kenya.

Building this product, with the team, has been one of the most meaningful journeys in my career.

The moment I cherish most

There is a feeling I have never been able to fully describe. You walk into a restaurant you have never been to — maybe you found it on Chowdeck, maybe you just followed your nose — and you notice it. The green interface on the tablet at the counter. The Orda screen.

Nobody sent you there. This owner, somewhere along the line, decided to run their business differently. And they chose what we built.

That feeling is better than any metric. It is proof that SaaS works in Africa. That restaurant owners will adopt software when it genuinely solves their problem.

How we actually built it

The honest answer is: we embedded ourselves with different restaurants and iterated until the Orda platform was adding value.

We did have an overarching start product vision but how we go there was not defined. We would go deep with a restaurant, watch how they operated, ship something, and stay close enough to know immediately when it was not working. Then we would fix it and go again. The cycle kept going until we hit that moment where the tool stopped being a tool and started being part of how they ran their day. That was the signal. That was when we knew we had something.

The other thing we were deliberate about — we studied how restaurant ERPs had been built elsewhere. The vertically integrated platforms, the enterprise systems, the global POS solutions. We learned from them. But we never let them dictate our decisions.

Because Orda had to work in Africa. And Africa, Nigeria in particular, has its own rules.

Public infrastructure here behaves differently. Connectivity drops. Power is unreliable. The operational mindset of a restaurant owner in Lagos is shaped by years of working around problems that a product person in a developed country has never had to think about. If you picked up the Orda platform and held it next to something built in San Francisco or London, some of our product decisions would look strange. Maybe even wrong. But they were not wrong — they were right for this market, and that distinction matters enormously.

Every time we faced a product decision, the question was never “how does the global benchmark do this?” It was “what does this restaurant in Lagos actually need?” That discipline is what makes Orda work.

Why Moniepoint is the right home

From the beginning, I knew Orda would be acquired. The platform we were building needed financial infrastructure to reach its full potential. We could help a restaurant run better — but helping it grow, giving it access to credit, making payments seamless — that required a different kind of foundation.

When Moniepoint emerged as the acquirer, my reaction was relief. Because if you have been watching what Moniepoint has been building, you know they get it.

They did not come in with grand vision statements. They built infrastructure for the informal economy the hard way — showing up where other fintechs did not bother, earning trust from businesses the formal banking system had written off. Over 20 million active customers. Hundreds of billions in annual transaction volume. Their ambitions are not small, and they are pointed in the right direction.

Orda joins Moniebook — Moniepoint’s all-in-one POS and business management platform — as the restaurant layer. The result closes a gap that has frustrated restaurant owners for years: orders recorded in one system, payments processed on a separate terminal, reconciliation done manually at the end of the night. That whole broken workflow finally has a clean fix.

Gratitude

To the Orda team — every engineer, customer success and operations person — thank you for showing up and building something worth being proud of. And to every restaurant owner who trusted us, gave honest feedback, and helped us get better — this was as much yours as ours.

Here is to what comes next.