Opera's Africa focused fintech startup OPay raises $120M Series B from Meituan-Dianping, SoftBank Asia, others, will expand to Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa
Africa focused fintech startup OPay has raised a $120 million Series B round backed by Chinese investors.
Context & Ripple Effects
Five months after Opera spun out OPay and raised a $50M round led by Sequoia China, IDG Capital, and Source Code Capital, the company has doubled down with $120M from Meituan-Dianping and SoftBank Asia — and immediately committed it to expansion beyond Nigeria into Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa.
The round lands days after rival PalmPay launched in Nigeria on a $40M seed from phone maker Transsion, confirming that Chinese strategic capital is now the dominant funding lane in West African mobile payments. It also sets up the trajectory the corpus later confirms: SoftBank's Vision Fund leading a $400M round at a $2B valuation and eventual preparations for a US IPO targeting $4B.
First-order effects
- OPay gains the capital to enter three new markets at once, putting it head-to-head with incumbents like South Africa's Ozow, which itself raised a $48M Tencent-led round two years later.
- Meituan-Dianping and SoftBank Asia become direct equity holders in an African payments platform, extending Chinese super-app playbook investment beyond their home market.
Second-order effects
- PalmPay's Transsion backing turns the Nigerian market into a proxy contest between Chinese strategics, forcing both startups to subsidize adoption rather than compete on product alone.
- SoftBank Asia's position here becomes the beachhead for SoftBank's broader Africa entry — its first African investment via Vision Fund 2 followed within two years.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, African fintech consolidates around China-backed platforms whose endgame is not regional dominance but Western public-market exits, as OPay's reported $4B IPO path shows.
- Local champions in each expansion market face a choice between raising comparable foreign strategic rounds or ceding scale to pan-African entrants funded at multiples of local rounds.
The trend: Chinese strategic capital is scaling African mobile payments from early-stage bets to multi-billion-dollar platforms headed for US public markets.