Youverify, a Lagos-based startup that helps automate due diligence and compliance by using data-driven decisions for the financial services, and telecommunication industries, has announced a raise of $1.5 million seed round of equity financing.
This comes after the startup raised an undisclosed pre-seed round by US-based venture capital firm, Village Capital and Nigerian-based Chinook Capital in 2018.
This seed round was led by Orange Digital Ventures Africa alongside Loftyinc Afropreneurs Fund, a West African early-stage technology fund that has previously backed top startups such as Andela, Flutterwave and Reliance HMO.
+1 in our @orange #Ventures Africa portfolio: Youverify, #identity & #data verification platform for businesses to #automate due diligence & #compliance
👏Congratulations to the team https://t.co/5MQNdWbWAi on raising their #SeedFunding https://t.co/KpUV3Yw1Dz #OrangeStartup pic.twitter.com/W9mdNjh5oy— Orange Ventures (@Orange_Ventures) March 10, 2020
Founded in 2017 by Gbenga Odegbami, Youverify provides API for address and identity verification in Africa. The company helps organisations use data and its insight to make automated and efficient business decisions and speed up previously manual back-office processes.
Odegbami had this to say about the raise.
“This constitutes a unique opportunity for us to take further our ambition to simplify and secure our 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.”
Orange Digital Ventures Africa and Loftyinc are hopeful the raise will help Youverify accelerate growth and execution of its technology roadmap.
“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 large markets. We have worked closely with Gbenga and his team over the past year and are excited to joint ODV and others on this journey,” Idris Bello, managing partner at Loftyinc said.
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In Africa where the due diligence process is traditionally arduous and manual, Youverify says it 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.
Since its launch, the startup has processed registrations and verification for banks and companies like Sterling Bank, Bolt, Kobo 360, and NIPOST.