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M-KOPA, the pan-African FinTech platform, has secured a $30 million senior debt commitment from Dutch development bank FMO for its electric motorbike financing unit, M-KOPA Kenya Mobility.
The facility is organised into three parts: FMO is providing two loans totalling $22.5 million, and there’s an additional $7.5 million commitment through the bank’s Building Prospects program to refinance a previous loan from an existing shareholder. Up to $23 million of this new funding will be used for new investments in electric motorbikes and batteries.
M-KOPA Kenya Mobility was launched in 2023 as a new branch focused on selling and financing two-wheelers. They offer a variety of bikes, including the locally made Roam Air, as well as the Ampersand Turaco and Spiro models that come with battery-swapping technology. They also provide fleet solutions for services like Bolt.
Customers can pay for their bikes in daily instalments, a payment system that M-KOPA has developed through years of experience with solar home systems and smartphones.
Each loan for an e-motorbike comes with added benefits under the “M-KOPA Cares” package, which includes insurance, roadside assistance, theft tracking, and a two-year warranty.
The announcement comes as M-KOPA reaches 10 million customers across its five African markets: Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, now onboarding 10,000 new users daily.
The company processes over two million payments daily and has unlocked more than $2 billion in credit to date, with revenue growing at an average annual rate of 50% since 2020.
The company targets what it calls “Every Day Earners” — traders, boda riders, tailors, and shopkeepers who generate income daily but remain invisible to conventional financial services.
Nine in 10 independently surveyed M-KOPA customers say the company’s products have improved their lives.
“Every Day Earners have always been creditworthy. What they needed was credit built around how they really make a living, not a payslip. Informal has never meant unviable. 10 million customers on, that’s no longer a belief. It’s proven,” said Jesse Moore, co-founder and CEO of M-KOPA.
According to the company, nearly nine in 10 workers in sub-Saharan Africa earn their living in the informal economy, and by 2040 Africa is projected to have among the largest populations of non-salaried, economically active adults in the world, the core market M-KOPA is built to serve.
The company has been named to the Financial Times’ Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies list for five consecutive years and to CNBC’s World’s Top FinTech Companies for the second consecutive year.
“Every Day Earners are why we do this. From our very first customer to this year’s ten millionth, this is proof that a model built for Africa’s Every Day Earners doesn’t just work, it scales and endures,” said Faraimose Kutadzaushe, CFO of M-KOPA.
