Opera’s OPay Secures $120m Funding to Scale Business in Africa

OPay, the Nigerian fintech startup, has disclosed that it has raised $120m in Series B funding to scale its investment in Africa.

The new fund Opay received was led by Chinese investors including Meituan-Dianping, GaoRong, Source Code Capital, Softbank Asia, BAI, Redpoint, IDG Capital, Sequoia China and GSR Ventures.

The firm plans to use the funding to expand its payments platform to other African nations, including Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.

This funding announcement follows a separate $50m Series A investment round led by IDG Capital, Sequoia China, Source Code Capital, Meituan-Dianping, GSR Ventures and Opera Limited.

Since the Series A, OPay has increased its daily transaction volume from $5m to $10m.

OPay, which is short for Opera Pay was launched by Opera in 2018. Opera’s web browser is the second most used web browser in Africa for the last four years running.

This further intensifies the competition in Nigeria’s fintech market following Visa’s investment in Interswitch and Lagos-based PalmPay which recently raised $40m.

As well as operating OPay in the continent, Opera also runs the ORide and OBus services. Oride is a ride-hailing platform primarily focused on motorcycles as the means of transport, while OBus offers a similar platform, focused on ride-sharing on buses.

As the consistent branding indicates, these platforms are all linked to OPay. The company also runs a lending service called OKash and a food delivery service called OFood.