OPay, the Nigerian based fintech company which had had a successive streak of fundings over the past years has secured $400 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, the venture capital arm of Japanese conglomerate, SoftBank.
With this fresh inflow, OPay has received the largest single investment funding from an African startup. The biggest news however is the valuation of the mobile payments platform at $2 billion by international venture capital, Softbank. This valuation is higher than the market valuation of any of the Nigerian tier-1 banks by the Nigerian Stock exchange based on end of day prices as of the 25th of June 2021. This also raises more questions about the banking penetration models of brick and mortar banking systems in Nigeria.
Other participants in this investment round are mainly Asian investors, which include Sequoia Capital China, DragonBall Capital, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, and 3W Capital.
OPay was founded in 2018, and raised two investments in 2019; $50 million in June and a $120 million Series B in November. The company has now successfully raised $570 million in investment fundings. We earlier reported that OPay has been given approval by Nigeria’s Apex Bank Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to commence international money transfers in Nigeria. Now, the company’s monthly transaction volumes exceed $3 billion, powered by a backbone of 300,000 agents and 5 million registered app users.
The company plans to expand its services to other countries as it focuses on the Middle East, and African markets.
[…] company, which had had a successive streak of fundings over the past years has secured $400 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, the venture capital arm of Japanese […]