Opera’s African focused fintech startup OPay has raised a $120 million Series B funding round from Chinese investors. According to the company’s CFO, as told to TechCrunch, OPay will use the funds to “scale in Nigeria and expand its payments product to Kenya, Ghana and South Africa”.
Some of the investors on this included Meituan-Dianping, GaoRong, Source Code Capital, Softbank Asia, BAI, Redpoint, IDG Capital, Sequoia China and GSR Ventures. This $120 million round comes after the startup raised $50 million in June.
Opera, the continent’s second most popular web browser after Chrome, founded OPay in 2018. It has gone on to build a string of off springs including motorcycle ride-hail app ORide, OFood delivery service, and OLeads SME marketing and advertising vertical.
Since its Series A raise, OPay in Nigeria has scaled to 140,000 active agents and $10 million in daily transaction volume, according to company stats.
The startup’s funding and expansion plans increase the competition within cross-border fintech in Africa. It also follows Visa’s $200 million investment in Nigerian fintech company Interswitch, making it a potential candidate for unicorn status.
Since the start of 2018, Interswitch’s $200 million funding round is the highest gathered by any African-based fin-tech startup.
