OPay押注代理支付取代尼日利亚现金；软银在非洲的首笔交易

做的是什么生意

A Nigerian mobile payments and agent-banking platform founded by Opera, offering transfers, bill payments, airtime and merchant services.

启动资金：$50M (2019) plus $120M Series B from Chinese investors

起因

Opera, the Norwegian browser company acquired by Chinese investors in 2016, founded OPay in 2018 in Lagos to turn its African user base into a fintech business. It launched a payments wallet alongside motorcycle ride-hailing ORide and food delivery OFood, raising $50M in June 2019 and a $120M Series B in November 2019 from Meituan-Dianping, Sequoia China, Source Code Capital and others, reaching 140,000 agents and $10M in daily transaction volume.

经过

In 2020, a Lagos government ban on motorcycle ride-hailing plus the pandemic forced OPay to close ORide and its bike-sharing business, leaving payments as the core bet. In August 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $400M Series C valuing OPay at $2B, its first investment in Africa; the company said monthly transaction volumes exceeded $3B and it would replicate the model in Egypt and the Middle East.

结果

OPay kept scaling in Nigeria and Egypt; by 2025 Opera's 9.5% stake implied a valuation around $3.1B. In 2026 it prepared a US IPO targeting about $4B with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan engaged, and Africa's Standard Bank was in early talks to take a pre-IPO stake.

可借鉴之处

当平台押注多个高频服务时，支付轨道才是持久资产：网约车和外卖业务可能消亡，而底层钱包继续累积价值。