OPay Receives $120 million from Chinese investors

By InstinctBusiness Nov 19, 20190

In a bid to advance its expansion in Africa, the Nigerian fintech startup, OPay has raised $120 million in a Series B funding round. The funding was led by Series B investors which include Meituan-Dianping, GaoRong, Source Code Capital, Softbank Asia, BAI, Redpoint, IDG Capital, Sequoia China and GSR Ventures.

Driven by the injection of the new capital, The CFO of Opera (OPay’s Parent company), Frode Jacobsen made it known that OPay would deploy the $120 million across Opera’s Africa network. It mentioned that, the fund raised was aimed at using it to scale up operations in Nigeria and expand its payments product to Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.

Jacobsen said that OPay is set to capture volume around bill payments and airtime purchases, but not necessarily as a priority as it aims to focus on services that have high-frequency usage. some of which Jacobsen said include transportation services, food services, amongst others.

According a statement from report, OPay Chairman and Opera’s CEO, Yahui Zhou, said that OPay sees itself as a key contributor to the business of helping local business evolved into digital business models.

“Opay will facilitate the people in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and other African countries with the best fintech ecosystem. We see ourselves as a key contributor to…helping local businesses…thrive from…digital business models,” Zhou, stated.

Meanwhile, Opay has previously raised $50 million funding in July earlier this year in its Series A raise from report. Since its first raise, OPay has scaled to 140,000 active agents and $10 million in daily transaction volume, in line with the company’s stats.

It is a payment platform developed by Opera Software. The platform enables users to shop and pay for services and products through their phones. OPay is currently available as an Android application and support card payments with Mastercard and Visa, as well as transfers from banking apps.

However, the company has built a hefty suite of internet-based commercial products in the country around OPay’s financial utility. These include motorcycle ride-hail app ORide, OFood delivery service, and OLeads SME marketing, amongst others.