Optasia raises $330M facility

Optasia just lined up $330 million in fresh financing, and the structure says a lot about what lenders think this business is now. The package includes a $180 million term loan and $150 million in bank guarantees, with Standard Bank leading the refinancing announced on April 10, 2026. (techcentral.co.za) That is not venture capital betting on a slide deck. It is bank debt for a company that reported $265.4 million in 2025 revenue, $115 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and a 1.2% default rate on the credit it helps underwrite. (optasia.com) Optasia’s original trick was simple enough to explain without finance jargon. If a prepaid phone user runs out of airtime on Tuesday and usually tops up on Friday, a mobile operator can advance a tiny amount now and recover it from the next recharge. (optasia.com, forbesmiddleeast.com) What makes that work is not the airtime itself. It is the scoring layer that looks at real-time behavior like recharge patterns and wallet activity, then decides in seconds whether a user is likely to repay a very small loan. (forbesmiddleeast.com, techcentral.co.za) That model grew up inside telecom networks because telecom companies already had distribution, billing rails, and millions of customers who touched their phones every day. By December 2024, Forbes Middle East said Optasia had access to 862 million network members and 123 million active customers across 40 countries. (forbesmiddleeast.com) By 2025, the business had started to tilt away from airtime advances and toward cash microloans. Optasia said annual credit facilitated for partners rose to $5.5 billion in 2025, up 44% from $3.8 billion in 2024, and said micro finance had become its primary revenue driver. (optasia.com) That shift helps explain why South African banks are showing up now. TechCentral reported that FirstRand raised its stake in Optasia to 26.1% in late March 2026, and Standard Bank followed with this refinancing less than two weeks later. (techcentral.co.za) Banks know the old problem here. In many developing economies, more people have a phone than a conventional credit file, and the World Bank said account ownership in developing economies reached 71% in 2021 largely because of mobile money adoption. (worldbank.org) The mobile money networks underneath that trend are still getting bigger. The Global System for Mobile Communications Association said mobile money processed more than $2 trillion in 2025 and reached 593 million active 30-day accounts. (gsma.com) So the headline is not just that Optasia borrowed $330 million. It is that traditional banks are financing a company built on telecom data and tiny repeat loans, because that combination now looks bankable at scale across emerging markets. (techcentral.co.za, optasia.com)