Nigerian based identity verification startup closed a $1.5 million seed round of equity financing from Orange Digital Ventures this week, opening doors for the firm’s next level of projects aimed at expanding its offerings across industry. The company with headquarters in Lagos Nigeria is a verification startup that helps automate due diligence and compliance by using data-driven decisions for the financial services, and telecommunication industries. Co-founded by its CEO Gbenga Odegbami, Youverify provides API for address and identity verification in Africa. The company has the ambition to help organisations use data and its insight to make automated and efficient business decisions. It also aims to help speed up previously manual back-office processes.
This round was led by Orange Digital Ventures Africa (ODV), Orange group’s dedicated Euro 50 million investment initiative in the Middle East and Africa region. It was joined by Loftyinc Afropreneurs Fund, a West African early-stage technology fund that has previously backed top startups such as Andela, Flutterwave and Reliance HMO.
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Speaking on the development, YouVerify CEO Gbenga Odegbami said that this constitutes a unique opportunity for the company to take further our ambition to simplify and secure its client’s internal processes, whether in the recruitment of staff, customer onboarding etc. “Our ambition is to be the leading African player in verifying people and companies’ identities by making data protection and security the core of our proposal”, he added. The investors are hopeful the raise will help Youverify accelerate growth and execution of its technology roadmap to empower Africans with their identity most reliably and securely.
According to Grégoire de Padirac, Investment manager at ODV,“the matters of security and access to financial or telecommunications services should never be at odds. Telecom operators like Orange are at the forefront of these transformation challenges. We are proud to support Youverify, which intends to resolve this triple objective of fostering financial inclusion, strengthening security and preserving user rights over their data”.
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On his part, Idris Bello, Managing Partner, Loftyinc said “we are excited to back Youverify in its quest. The investment fits into our thesis of backing strong local founding teams with a bias towards execution, leveraging technology in solving key problems across Africa’s large markets. We have worked closely with Gbenga and his team over the past year and are excited to joined ODV and others on this journey.”
Since its commercial launch in 2018 in Lagos, Youverify has processed registrations and verification for some of the biggest banks, Fintech platforms and on-demand platforms in Nigeria. Youverify’s solution allows organisations to bring together siloed data sources which can include identity data, educational data, addressing data, credit history, facial image and others to drive a customisable decision-making process to seamlessly onboard customers in a secure and regulatory compliant manner.
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In Africa where the due diligence process is traditionally arduous and manual, Youverify offers a simple, nimble, easy-to-adopt, and cost-effective solution to transform the customer onboarding decisions and streamline this process while reducing fraud, manual processes and cost.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry