M-KOPA (Kenya/UK)

M-KOPA was founded in 2010 in Nairobi. Its three co-founders — Nick Hughes, Jesse Moore, and Chad Larson — spotted a paradox: 70% of Kenyans had no bank account, yet 90% had mobile coverage, and the mobile money system M-Pesa was already moving money at scale. The question was what ordinary people could actually buy with it. Their answer was light: a $200 solar home system, financed through a GSM chip embedded in the device and a remote lock — customers pay a few cents a day through M-Pesa to "own it one day at a time." Pay on time and it runs normally; miss a payment and it locks automatically until the next payment unlocks it. That self-enforcing collateral mechanism became M-KOPA's core engine. Around 2016 the company pivoted from solar to smartphones, and in 2023 it extended the same model to electric motorcycles — the product kept changing, but the underlying logic stayed the same: turn a daily repayment record into a credit history. After three months of stable payments, customers unlock digital loans, health insurance, and device protection. Today M-KOPA operates in five African countries, has served more than 7 million customers, and has released over $2 billion in cumulative credit — 2.5 million of those customers got online for the first time through an M-KOPA device. What started as a hardware retailer has become a fintech company that uses its own credit-scoring system to redefine who deserves to be lent to.