M-KOPA, the Kenyan company that sells smartphones and other goods to customers who pay in small daily instalments, has bought KilpiTek Oy, a young Finnish company that makes software for remotely locking devices. The purchase was worth $8 million.
The deal closed on 26 March 2026, when M-KOPA took 100 per cent of KilpiTek's voting shares, but it only became public on 7 October. It surfaced in M-KOPA's accounts for 2025, which its board approved on 30 June and which were filed at the UK's Companies House on 5 October.
M-KOPA paid $2,666,702 in cash, about a third of the total. The remaining $5,333,298 was listed in the accounts as a mix of equity, deferred consideration and remuneration, without a breakdown. KilpiTek's owners received M-KOPA ordinary shares in exchange for their stake, Tech-ish reported.
What KilpiTek built
KilpiTek is based in Tampere, Finland, and was founded in 2023 by five co-founders, according to a company profile cited by The Condia. Its website lists device locking, software development and device management, and says its security products serve pay-as-you-go and micro-finance businesses.
Its core product lets a lender restrict or switch off a financed smartphone from a distance when the owner falls behind on payments. M-KOPA did not disclose KilpiTek's revenue, profit or number of employees, and the founders were not named in any of the coverage.
“On 26 March 2026, the Group completed the acquisition of KilpiTek Oy, a Finnish-based software business that provides device-locking and related technology services. The transaction is intended to strengthen the Group's control over a critical component of its technology stack and support ongoing product and sourcing strategy.”
Why M-KOPA is buying
Remote locking is the security behind M-KOPA's loans. Customers put down a deposit and then pay daily or periodically, and the ability to lock a phone stands in for the collateral that a bank would normally demand. Tech-ish noted that M-KOPA's own estimates of loan losses assume some money is recovered by locking phones.
Until now M-KOPA has licensed that capability from others, mainly Samsung Knox and HMD Global's Softlock, The Condia reported. In its accounts, M-KOPA said the purchase was meant to bring a critical device-locking capability in-house, tighten its control over a key part of its technology stack and support its product and phone-sourcing plans.
Owning the software could let M-KOPA adapt the lock to handsets from different manufacturers and depend less on outside suppliers for a tool that sits at the heart of its credit risk management, TechCabal wrote.
How the deal shows up in the books
Because the purchase happened after M-KOPA's year-end of 31 December 2025, it is recorded as a non-adjusting subsequent event and does not change the 2025 results. The allocation of the purchase price, including any goodwill, had not been completed when the accounts were approved and is due to appear in M-KOPA's 2026 accounts, according to Tech-ish.
In Kenyan terms the price comes to roughly KES 1.04 billion, of which about KES 345 million was paid in cash, using the exchange rate of KES 129.56 to the dollar on 7 October, Tech-ish calculated. The accounts do not say how the non-cash portion splits between shares, deferred payments and remuneration, and none of the coverage said what role the Finnish team will play at M-KOPA.
M-KOPA's growing smartphone business
M-KOPA began by selling solar home systems that could be shut off remotely and moved into smartphone financing in 2020. It now operates in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa and also finances electric motorbikes.
WeeTracker reported that M-KOPA's revenue reached $600 million in 2025, up 45 per cent, and that the company has 10 million customers in total after adding 3 million in the past year. It employs more than 2,500 full-time staff and works with nearly 50,000 sales agents. Its Nairobi assembly plant, opened in 2023, has produced more than 2 million devices. The company became profitable in 2024, The Condia reported, and Nigeria was its fastest-growing market last year.
At that scale, a small software purchase gives M-KOPA control over the mechanism that protects a large book of phone loans, rather than relying on licences from handset makers and third-party vendors.
