Nigeria fintech OPay sees valuation bumped up

OPay’s merchandise in Nigeria, its largest market, are a checking account for sooner on-line cash transfers than conventional banks present, and a point-of-sale system that allows distributors to simply accept card funds and provide money withdrawals to clients. Nigeria’s botched foreign money redesign final 12 months accelerated OPay’s growth as a serious participant within the nation’s monetary providers ecosystem.

The fintech big was OPay was based by Chinese language billionaire Zhou Yahui and valued at $2 billion in 2021 when it raised $400 million in a spherical led by SoftBank, with the participation of buyers together with Sequoia Capital China. It has remained certainly one of Africa’s most useful startups within the years since, drawing nearer to Flutterwave’s February 2022 valuation of $3 billion. It comes at a time when some lofty valuations of African-based startups are struggling to be maintained as a result of slowdown in enterprise funding over the past 12 months.

Opera’s elevated stake in OPay got here by way of a transaction to purchase the vast majority of the Asian enterprise of Nanobank, a lender that Opera partly owned. Opera had held its OPay shares as “on the market” since 2021 till final December, signaling a change in notion of OPay’s prospects, together with higher risk of an preliminary public providing within the close to future.