By
Godfrey Benjamin
September 13th, 2023
Opay, which was founded by Opera, the web browser developer, just recently raised $120 million in series B round, which mainly was backed by Chinese investors, confirmed Opera’s CFO Frode Jacobsen.
In recent news, OPay has raised $120 million on a series B round backed by Chinese investors. Their primary initiative for the fundraise is to scale in Nigeria and expand its payments service to Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.
The series B round investors, as mentioned above, were mainly from China. The companies include Meituan-Dianping, GaoRong, Source Code Capital, Softbank Asia, BAI, Redpoint, IDG Capital, Sequoia China, and GSR Ventures. In June 2019, OPay also raised $50 million.
Opera, for the past four years, has been the second most used web browser behind Chrome. In general, Opera along with its other products has taken over Nigeria. They offer a ride-hailing app – ORide, a food delivery service – OFood, and an SME marketing and advertising platform – OLeads.
“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,” in a statement explained the chairman of OPay and CEO of Opera, Yahui Zhou.
As Opera’s CFO Frode Jacobson explains, OPay is looking to capture the bill payments and airtime purchases, but he adds that it’s not a major priority.
“That’s not something you do every day. We want to focus our services on things that have high-frequency usage,” he commented.
The statistics around OPay are pretty impressive. Since its Series A funding round, it has scaled to 140,000 agents and $10 million in daily transactions.
But overall, Nigeria has become a goldmine for Chinese investors. When counting all startups that they have invested in, Chinese investors account for approximately $240 million in just a few months.
The continent of Africa has become a mecca for fintech startups. As the continent represents the largest share of unbanked people, new fintech companies are trying to push the sector in order to change the banking issue for these people. But at the moment, there are way too many fintech companies in Africa, so a lot of failures are expected to come.
OPay along with Opera has an advantage that they already have a bunch of internet services that people already use. However, there is one player in Africa that experts say Opera will have a tight competition with. It is Africa’s largest multi-service internet company – Jumia.