M-KOPA has crossed 10 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, a milestone the pan African fintech reached just six years after signing its first million.
The company announced the figure on 22 July 2026 from its London base, marking one of the fastest scale ups in African financial services. It took M-KOPA eight years, from its first solar sale in 2012, to reach one million customers in 2020. Since then, growth has accelerated sharply: the company added nine million more customers in the six years that followed, and now onboards roughly 10,000 new customers every day.
What Changed In 2020
The turning point came when M-KOPA moved beyond its original solar financing business and entered smartphone financing. That shift gave rise to what the company calls its “More than a Phone” platform, which bundles a financed smartphone with embedded insurance, credit and device protection from the moment of purchase.
The model targets what M-KOPA labels “Every Day Earners”: traders, boda boda riders, tailors and shopkeepers who earn income daily but rarely qualify for loans from conventional banks. Traditional lenders require payslips and credit histories these customers do not have. M-KOPA instead builds repayment schedules around how its customers actually earn, using the smartphone itself as the entry point into a broader set of financial products.
Jesse Moore, co founder and chief executive of M-KOPA, framed the milestone as validation of that approach. “Every Day Earners have always been creditworthy,” he said. “What they needed was credit built around how they really make a living, not a payslip. Informal has never meant unviable. Ten million customers on, that’s no longer a belief. It’s proven.”
The Numbers Behind The Milestone
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total customers | 10 million |
| Customers added since 2020 | 9 million |
| New customers per day | About 10,000 |
| Average annual revenue growth since 2020 | 50% |
| Daily payments processed | More than 2 million |
| Total credit unlocked | More than $2 billion |
| Distribution agents across five markets | More than 40,000 |
| Devices produced at Kenya assembly plant | More than 3.3 million |
| Customers reporting improved quality of life | 9 in 10, per independent survey |
Why Nigeria Stands Out
Growth outside East Africa has picked up speed too. Nigeria, which M-KOPA entered in 2019, became the fastest market in the company’s history to reach one million customers. The country has since taken in more than 170 million dollars in credit, according to recent reporting on the business. Ghana moved fastest from pilot to full scale operation among all five markets.
That expansion rests on a distribution network built rather than borrowed. More than 40,000 sales agents now operate across the five countries, giving M-KOPA a direct line to customers that few competitors in the asset financing space, including Sun King, d.light and EasyBuy, can match at the same scale.
Manufacturing At Home
M-KOPA has also pushed into local production. In 2023 the company opened what it describes as the largest smartphone assembly facility on the continent, based in Kenya. The plant employs more than 400 people, holds global ISO certification and has produced over 3.3 million devices to date. That local manufacturing base underpins the financing model by keeping device costs down and supply reliable as the company signs up thousands of new customers daily.
A Business Model That Now Shows Up In The Numbers
The scale up has coincided with a shift from growth at any cost to growth that pays for itself. M-KOPA posted its first annual profit in October 2025, alongside a sharp jump in revenue, and its Kenyan subsidiary alone had passed 1.6 billion dollars in cumulative credit disbursed by the following month.
Average annual revenue growth has held at 50% since 2020, performance that has earned the company a place on the Financial Times list of Africa’s fastest growing companies for five straight years and on CNBC’s ranking of top global fintech firms for two years running.
What Comes Next
M-KOPA frames the 10 million mark as a staging point rather than a destination. Company leadership has said the focus now turns to the next 10 million customers, extending the same model of embedded credit, insurance and device protection to a market where, by 2040, Africa is projected to hold the largest population of economically active people without salaried income anywhere in the world. If M-KOPA can keep adding customers at anything close to its current pace, that next milestone may arrive far sooner than the first one did.
