OPay, a Nigerian-based fintech organization raises a whopping sum of $400m in a new funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund, a Japanese conglomerate of SoftBank valuing the company at $2billion.
Existing investors such as Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, and Softbank Ventures Asia participated in the round, which marked the Fund’s first investment in an African startup. Other investors in the new financing round included DragonBall Capital and 3W Capital.
Speaking about the funding, Yahui Zhou, CEO of OPay, stated that the company is focused on rising technological markets to accelerate economic development.
Speaking to Bloomberg, he said,
“We want to be the power that helps emerging markets reach faster economic development.”
This news comes three months after reporting that they were in talks with a group of Chinese investors to raise to $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, and also two years after announcing their funding rounds in 2019 – $50 billion in June and a $120 million Series B in November.
It was founded in 2018 and formerly provided ride-hailing and logistics services before closing down last year due to a government ban on motorcycles in Lagos. It has since evolved into a mobile money and payment platform thriving in the African markets where it currently operates. With over 3000 agents and 5 million users in Nigeria, it enables the underbanked and unbanked to send and receive money and pay bills through a network of thousands of agents. SoftBank believes that this investment will drive the startup’s expansion into other African markets as well as the Middle East.
As a result of the global pandemic, the firm experienced exponential growth, with the value of its gross transactions increasing by 4.5x to more than $2 billion in December. The company’s monthly transaction volumes currently exceed $3 billion.
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