M-KOPA's pay-as-you-go bet: solar for off-grid Kenya, then 10M customers and first profit

M-KOPA is a Nairobi-born asset-financing platform that sells solar home systems, smartphones, cash loans and insurance to underbanked customers in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, paid off in micro-instalments via mobile money.

That Africa's unbanked off-grid customers will buy solar, phones, loans and insurance through daily mobile-money micro-payments, with devices locked until paid off.

Over $250M in equity and debt through 2023, including a May 2023 package of $200M in debt led by Standard Bank and $55M in equity led by Sumitomo Corporation

M-KOPA was founded in 2011 in Nairobi by Nick Hughes and Jesse Moore, colleagues from Vodafone; Hughes had created M-PESA, launched commercially in 2007. After announcing a partnership with Safaricom in October 2012, M-KOPA sold pay-as-you-go solar home systems through more than 300 Safaricom shops: customers paid a deposit, topped up days of credit by phone, and owned the system outright after roughly 12 months.

M-KOPA expanded from solar into smartphone financing (from 2019), then cash loans, insurance and merchant buy-now-pay-later, with an assembly plant in Nairobi. It raised $75M in equity in 2022 led by Generation Investment Management, then a $250M debt-equity package in May 2023 ($200M debt led by Standard Bank; $55M equity led by Sumitomo Corporation). By 2023 it had provided over $1B in cumulative credit to more than 3M customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana.

Still scaling: M-KOPA reported its first annual profit — KES 1.2B ($9.2M) for 2024, reversing a KES 3.2B ($24.7M) 2023 loss — on revenue up 66% to KES 53.7B ($416M). In July 2026 it said it serves 10M customers across five markets, onboarding about 10,000 a day via more than 40,000 sales agents.

The wedge was price: solar credit at about $0.40/day cost less than the kerosene and batteries customers already bought, so adoption saved money from day one.

Mobile money made micro-payments natural: M-PESA mirrored daily cash income, and the M2M lock in the device meant the hardware itself enforced repayment.

M-KOPA expanded the same rails across products — phones, loans, insurance — so each financed device became a gateway to more of its digital finance stack.

Discipline paid off: tightened underwriting, cost control and 50%+ average annual revenue growth took the company from a decade of losses to its first profit in 2024.

M-KOPA matched credit to how customers actually earn — daily micro-payments, not monthly salary — and let the hardware enforce repayment: M2M locks made default hard and ownership a savings milestone.

As of September 2026, M-KOPA serves 10M customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, onboarding roughly 10,000 daily through its own 40,000+ agent network. Its Kenyan arm has extended over $1.6B in credit and Nigeria accounts for 1M+ customers and ₦231B ($170M) disbursed. After its first profit for 2024, M-KOPA is the reference point for whether Africa's pay-as-you-go and BNPL models can be self-sustaining, even as Sun King, d.light and EasyBuy crowd the same market.