Upon graduation, Timbo Drayson joined Google where he spent seven years working in product management and marketing. Highlights of his time at Google include the launch of Google Maps across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and taking Chromecast from idea to launch, filing seven patents along the way.
In 2014, Timbo took a sabbatical from Google and used this time to travel across East and West Africa. While traveling across Africa in 2014, Timbo discovered that Google Maps did not work perfectly in Africa. With this realization, he built OkHi in Kenya to provide address verification services for businesses, including eCommerce and ride-hailing startups.
Founded in Kenya in 2014, OkHi provides digital address verification to financial services, tackling a problem space that is holding back growth and stifling access to credit for millions of Nigerians. OkHi’s smart addressing technology makes it easy for financial services to verify their customer’s addresses through their smartphone, replacing the need for utility bills or physical visits.
While there have been solutions such as Google’s “Plus Codes,” OkHi’s solution is different because it focuses on addressing people and not locations.
OkHi’s success in Kenya reduces the cost of delivery by 20% and decreases delivery time by 40%.
Also Read: From E-Commerce To Fintech – The Journey Of Wasoko
Growth
In December 2020, the startup launched in Nigeria after reportedly verifying over 300,000 addresses in Kenya. This launch also saw it partner with fintech giant, Interswitch, which doubles as an investor. The partnership aimed to assist OkHi’s objective which is to provide 195 million Nigerians with access to a physical address. This will in turn lead to accelerating the eCommerce sector and ensuring financial inclusion.
Since its launch, OkHi has created addresses in 54 countries and affirms to have encountered high demand from businesses in countries across the globe — Egypt, India, South America, and Southeast Asia. In order to fully process its launch in the Nigerian market where it targets 1 million users within six months, the company turned down requests from those countries for now.
OkHi Funding
In 2015, OkHi raised US$325,000 from angel investors, and it also received a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program.
In December 2015, OkHi further raised US$750,000 in funding from a group of local and international investors, including Garage Capital, a seed and early-stage venture capital fund based in Silicon Valley, and former Google CFO Patrick Pichette.
In 2020, OkHi raised a GBP1.4 million (US$1.78 million) funding round, supported by the London-based Angel Investment Network, to expand its team and grow operations in other African countries.
In 2022, OkHi closed a $1.5 Million seed extension round to expand its team currently operating remotely across Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and London, with extensive employment in engineering, sales, and products departments to drive consumer and B2B growth. The round included investors such as Chapel Hill Denham, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Flutterwave’s founder and other executives as well as EXFI, a syndicate of ex-Googlers.
SOURCES: TheFlip, TechCabal, Disrupt Africa, Crunchbase
