Chinese GPs back $120m Series B for OPay
A group of Chinese investors including Gaorong Capital and Sequoia Capital China have joined a $120 million Series B round for Nigerian logistics and payments technology company Opay.
Meituan-Dianping, along with its investment arm Dragonball Capital, also participated, as did GSR Ventures, Source Code Capital, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, IDG Capital, Redpoint China, and SoftBank Ventures Asia. It comes four months after a $50 million Series A from IDG, Source Code, Sequoia, Meituan-Dianping, and GSR.
Opay, a mobile wallet that services a number of transportation and logistics verticals, is one of the highest-profile start-ups in an accelerating trend of Chinese VCs entering Africa. The company, incubated last year by Norwegian internet services provider Opera, has recently expanded operations into food delivery and is planning to replicate its Nigeria-focused model across Africa.
“OPay will facilitate the people in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, and other African countries with the best fintech ecosystem that Africa has ever seen, paired with the inclusion of daily-use services such as transportation and delivery,” Yahui Zhou, OPay’s CEO, said in a statement. “We see ourselves as a key contributor to expanding financial inclusion in Africa and helping local businesses and workforces to thrive from opportunities created by new, digital business models.”
The business is positioned as “agent-focused” fintech for an unbanked user base, whereby cash transactions can be realized via a network of thousands of individual agents. The company claims to have tripled its number of active agents since the Series A to more than 140,000 and doubled its daily transaction volume to $10 million, while also tripling the number of daily rides. Ongoing operational expansions include a motorbike hailing app called ORide.
Chinese investment interest in African start-ups is underpinned by the view that the continent’s young, increasingly tech-savvy consumer markets mirror familiar Asian opportunities, although hesitancy persists due to cultural barriers. Recent activity in this theme includes investments in logistics platform Lori Systems, bus-hailing app Swvl, and payments provider Gona. In April, Boomplay, a Chinese music platform aiming to be Africa’s Spotify, raised a $20 million Series A.
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