OPay, a Nigeria-focused digital financial services company, has listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), raising $304 million in its initial public offering (IPO) and securing a market capitalisation of more than $4 billion.

The company began trading on Friday, pricing its offering at $19 per American Depositary Share (ADS). It sold 16 million ADSs, with each representing 10 ordinary shares.

According to the company, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission declared its registration statement effective on 29 October, and the offering was expected to close on 2 November.

Lars Boilesen, OPay’s co-chief executive officer, said the listing marked a significant milestone for the company and Nigeria’s financial technology sector.

“Today, OPay serves over 50 million monthly active users across Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Since launching in Nigeria eight years ago, we have pioneered seamless digital payments to become the country’s leading digital financial platform,” he said.

Mr Boilesen said the company had recorded a 9.9 per cent market share across Africa and the Middle East based on monthly average users in the first half of 2026.

He said OPay saw further growth opportunities in Nigeria, where an estimated 40 million adults remained outside the formal financial system.

“Our journey is just beginning. In Nigeria, an estimated 40 million adults remain outside the formal financial system,” he said.

He added that the company intended to apply its experience in Nigeria to other emerging markets, where young populations and increasing mobile internet access were expanding demand for digital financial services.

Stephen Wen, another co-chief executive officer of OPay, said the company was positioned to expand across emerging markets, citing growing smartphone penetration and demand for accessible financial services.

“In Nigeria, more than 60 per cent of the population are underserved by traditional banks and rely on cash. As we grow, we will stay focused on solving our customers’ pain points to make financial services accessible and convenient,” he said.

James Perry, OPay’s chief financial officer, said the company had reached a $1 billion revenue run rate in the second quarter of 2026.

He said OPay recorded 137 per cent year-on-year growth and a 19 per cent net margin in the first six months of the year.

ALSO READ: How OPay is taking financial inclusion closer to more Nigerians

“OPay enters the public markets from a position of financial strength, reaching a $1 billion revenue run rate in Q2 2026. For the first six months of 2026, we grew 137% year-on-year and reached 19% net margin,” Mr Perry said.

He said the company planned to use the IPO proceeds to invest in technology and support growth in Nigeria and other African markets.

OPay has expanded beyond payments into savings, credit and merchant services, with plans to develop a broader financial and lifestyle platform.

Launched in Nigeria in 2018, OPay operates an integrated digital financial platform serving users in Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Naturally, Rama Afullo’s first reaction was, “Let’s GOOOO,” he said. His company, Satlyt, is building software to turn existing satellites into data processing networks, similar to the orbital data center concept. And he just took another step closer to that.

After 13 months of work, the company had a successful test earlier this month. Working with the University of Houston on a NASA-funded research project, the test showed how the startup’s software can spread out tasks among computers while in orbit based on communication and available compute.

He said the goal is to create software that connects to multiple satellites to share computing assignments. Users of the system “will only need to define permissions, priorities, and operating limits,” while the software will make decisions within those limits, Afullo told TechCrunch. Its software is already on three satellites in orbit and the first step to that vision was this test. While the test used NASA-funded research, the agency has not yet selected it for any particular mission or chosen it to deploy its technology.

Afullo said NASA missions face the same constraints that Satlyt hopes to address — “limited computing resources, intermittent communication, and the need to get useful information back to people.” 

In this test, the company created a simulated network with four computers, four users, and eight services. The software then assessed how to assign and run tasks on those computers, accounting for compute and communication availability. Only one physical computer on a spacecraft in orbit ran the software — the other three were just simulations — eventually sending the results back to Earth. The test proved that Satlyt’s software can generate plans on hardware in orbit, but more testing will be done to see how those computers transfer information amongst each other in practice when multiple physical computers are used. 

“The finding is a trade-off,” he said. One approach worked best, though it required more computing power than the others.

Still, Satlyt which was in the top five of TechCrunch Disrupt Battle this year calls this a win. “It’s a building block toward satellites sharing computing work,” he said.

NASA already has a technology network designed to move data through space even when communication links face delays. It started using this tech earlier this year and has already tested it on aircraft.

Afullo, who previously worked at Google and SpaceX, founded Satlyt in 2024 to turn spacecraft into virtual data centers. Its software helps operators run AI and other applications onboard, processing data closer to where it is collected and reducing dependence on downlinks, where satellites send data back to Earth, and ground-based analysis done mainly by humans. 

For example, if a spacecraft sees a wildfire on Earth, such software can help it transmit relevant information much faster. “The goal is to get useful answers to people sooner and make better use of limited communication windows,” he said. “This experiment tested one planning component of that broader capability.” 

Satlyt said it still needs to test its own software under various workloads, hardware and connectivity conditions. They also found an issue in how their software was time-referencing delays, Afullo said — it was stamping it as arrival time (the time it arrived) rather than elapsed delay (how long it took to arrive), which is a different metric. 

It doesn’t mean the experiment failed, however. “The software development, onboard execution, and return of outputs succeeded,” he said.

But Afullo said much work remains. “We also need usable communication links, permission from participating operators, secure transfers, resource scheduling, and recovery when a connection of computers becomes unavailable.” They hope to launch in other environments aside from low Earth orbit soon. 

“Our next technical steps are broader validation and integration, followed by demonstrations of computing work shared across separate spacecraft,” he said. “Longer term, we want developers to build applications for space without having to rebuild the infrastructure for every mission. That’s what virtual AI data centers in space mean to us.”