OPay, a Nigerian mobile platform for making payments, arranging car rides and ordering deliveries from restaurants, recently raised USD 120 million in equity from 10 investors to scale up in Nigeria and expand to countries such as Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. OPay’s transportation arm, ORide, facilitates up to 100,000 rides per day. Its payment platform offers services via 40,000 agents as of July 2019.
OPay was created in 2018 after the internet services firm Opera acquired PayCom from Telnet Nigeria. Opera was founded in Norway and bought by a Chinese consortium in 2016. It is listed on the US-based NASDAQ stock exchange and reported net income of USD 28.1 million during the third quarter of 2019.
The series B investors in OPay include five from China: Gaorong Capital, GSR Ventures, Meituan-Dianping, Meituan-Dianping’s DragonBall Capital and Source Code Capital. Two of the investors are controlled by US-based firms: Redpoint Ventures China and Sequoia Capital China. The others are SoftBank Ventures Asia, an arm of the Japanese Softbank Group; Bertelsmann Asia Investments, a unit of Germany’s Bertelsmann; and IDG Capital, which was founded in the US and has 13 offices in East Asia, the UK, the US and Vietnam.
By Ng Chee Meng, Research Associate
Sources and Additional Resources
Quartz article on OPay series B funding
https://qz.com/africa/1750651/african-fintech-opay-raises-120m-from-chinese-investors/
Techcrunch article on OPay series B funding
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/17/operas-africa-fintech-startup-opay-gains-120m-from-chinese-investors/
Techcabal article on OPay
https://techcabal.com/2019/10/02/oeverything-can-opay-really-dominate-nigerias-fintech-market/
OPay homepage
https://operapay.com
Phys.org article on purchase of Opera
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-chinese-consortium-opera-browser-mn.html
Opera Q3 financial results
https://investor.opera.com/news-releases/news-release-details/opera-limited-announces-third-quarter-2019-financial-results
Crunchbase profile on Bertelsmann Asia Investments
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bertelsmann-asia-investments#section-overview
Redpoint Ventures China homepage
http://www.rpvchina.com
Bloomberg profile on Gaorong Capital
https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0946918D:CH
IDG Capital homepage
https://www.idgcapital.com
Bloomberg profile on Sequoia Capital
https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/18308Z:US
Bloomberg profile on GSR Ventures
https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/18308Z:US
Meituan-Danping homepage
https://about.meituan.com/
Bloomberg profile on Meituan-Danping
https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/3690:HK
Source Code Capital homepage
https://sourcecodecap.com/
Softbank Venture Asia homepage
http://www.softbank.co.kr/en/
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