Lagos-based OPay, the FinTech startup, has bagged $120m in a massive new investment round to scale its Nigerian presence and to tap into Kenya, Ghana and South Africa’s markets.
Investors included Chinese group buying website Meituan-Dianping as well as venture capital firms Gaorong Capital, Source Code Capital, IDG Capital, Sequia China and GSR Ventures. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s venture capital arm SoftBank Asia also participated.
The Series B round comes after OPay raised $50m in June, TechCrunch reported.
OPay was founded in 2018 by Opera, the Norwegian internet search engine which majority is owned by Chinese owners. The payment company is part of Opera’s family of companies that include ride-hailing startup ORide, food-delivery enterprise OFood and OLeads, the SME marketing and advertising vertical. All of these businesses are based in Nigeria.
OPay’s new round is another sign that Africa is becoming a hotbed for FinTech ventures. The continent’s FinTech startups raised over $1.1bn since 2014, according to FinTech Global’s data.
Another example is that it also got a new unicorn the other week when digital payments company Interswitch achieved a valuation worth over $1bn after Visa injected money into the business.
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