| Company type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Fintech |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founders | Nick Hughes, Chad Larson, Jesse Moore |
| Headquarters | , United Kingdom |
Areas served | Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa |
| Products | Smartphones & financial services |
| Website | Official website |
M-Kopa (M for mobile, kopa is Swahili for borrow, stylized as M-KOPA) [1] is a UK-headquartered emerging market fintech platform that provides affordable smartphones and digital financial services. [2] [3] M-Kopa was launched commercially in 2012 and is headquartered in London. The company is currently operating in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa. [4]
M-KOPA uses a financing model based on daily repayments, providing affordable smartphones integrated with financial services that fit with the cash flow of underserved individuals who earn their income on a daily basis. [5] [6]
In 2010, Moore and Hughes, with banker Chad Larson, founded the start-up in Nairobi that became M-Kopa the following year. [7] Hughes previously set up and ran M-Pesa at Vodafone, a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service, where Moore also worked whilst completing his MBA. [8] Larson and Moore were fellow MBA students at Oxford University. [2] [3]
In 2011, M-Kopa raised money with incubation by Signal Point Partners. [9] Backing investors have included Richard Branson, Generation Investment Management, Blue Haven Initiative and LGT Venture Philanthropy, an investment vehicle of the Princely Family of Liechtenstein. [7] M-Kopa was launched commercially in late 2012. [10] [1]
By 2015, it said it had powered 150,000 households in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, with around 10,000 mobile payments made by users on its cloud platform, M-Kopanet, made on a daily basis. [1] It had over $40 million of revenue by 2015. [11] [12] In 2015, M-Kopa estimated that 80 percent of its customers lived on less than $2 a day. [13]
In February 2015, M-Kopa announced a plan to blacklist defaulters on its loans with credit bureaus. [14]
It had connected over 300,000 homes in East Africa to Solar power, as of early January 2016 [10] In 2016, M-Kopa sold 30,000 solar TVs in Kenya, looking to add internet access. [15] By December 2016, the company had sold around 400,000 systems in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda since its launch in 2011, under CEO Jesse Moore. [16] As of 2016, there were plans to begin manufacturing all the products in Kenya. [17]
By January 2018, the company had wired at least 500,000 homes, and sold about 90,000 solar rechargeable televisions. [18] In 2018, it was reported that M-Kopa would acquire an additional 500,000 photovoltaic solar panels, under chairman Mugo Kibati, in an agreement with Solinc East Africa. [19] In February 2018, M-Kopa received $10 million in funding from FinDev Canada in a new funding round led by CDC, and including existing shareholders LGT Venture Philanthropy and Generation Investment Management.
In July 2021, M-Kopa announced its expansion to Nigeria. [20] In 2024, the company had extended over $1.5 billion in credit to more than 5 million customers and stated that it employs over 3,000 staff members and 30,000 sales agents across its African markets. [6] [5]
M-KOPA utilises payments data and proprietary AI-driven analytics to create a credit record for each customer to form long-term financial relationships that include digital loans, affordable digital subscriptions and insurance. [21] [22] Customers pay a deposit of KSh. 3,500/= (approx US$35), and then pay 50/= (approx US$0.50) a day for a period of one year, [23] to own the smartphone device. Daily payments are made through M-Pesa, a mobile phone based money system, [24] at about 45 cents a day. [1] This way, in addition to getting their device, customers also slowly off-set the cost of the device. [24]
The company also provides an upgrade products and services that include; smartphones and digital financial services. The company also has a dedicated and ring-fenced R&D unit, M-Kopa Labs, which deploys research grants to test new technology and extensions to the M-Kopa platform [25]
M-Kopa is supported by a number of partners. Mobile network operators—like Safaricom—are partnering with M-Kopa to support mobile money and value-added services. Manufacturers and brands are partnering to provide a platform for market entry, finance and last mile access. Payments companies like Mastercard and challenger banks see the disruptive power of the platform on traditional clicks and mortar banking. [26]
M-Kopa won the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Award 2014, as well as two awards from the Financial Times , for Technology in Sustainable Finance and Excellence in Sustainable Finance, both in 2013. In 2015, M-Kopa was recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the "Top 50 Companies Changing the World", and won the Zayed Future Energy Award 2015, [27] In February 2016, it was recognised as the Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets at the Global Mobile Awards. M-Kopa was named on MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of "50 Smartest Companies" in June 2017. [28] In March 2016, it emerged boldest at the Financial Times Arcelor Mittal – Boldness in Business Awards in the developing markets category. [29] Fast Company listed M-Kopa in the 2018 edition of the "World's Most Innovative Companies", number four out of 10 in Africa. [30] The company was also named among the global Cleantech 100 companies in 2019. [31]
M-Kopa was listed in the Financial Times' "Africa's Fastest Growing Companies" rankings three years in a row in 2022, [32] 2023, [33] and 2024. [34] The company was also included in TIME' "100 Most Influential Companies" list in 2023 and 2024. [35]
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