Orange Digital Ventures Africa (ODV) has announced its latest $1.5 million seed investment round on Youverify, a Lagos, Nigeria-based firm which automates identity and background verification processes, primarily serving financial and telecommunication service providers.
Youverify now becomes the fifth company to join the portfolio of Orange group’s African investment initiative.
Financial and mobile payment services continue to accelerate their development on the continent. Verification tasks remain complex and manual for major players, fintech and large corporates and the rise of RegTech companies, such as Youverify, is key for the market in order to speed up and simplify these tasks.
Co-founded by Gbenga Odegbami, the company’s CEO, Youverify aims to help companies automate the verification processes of different types of data treated separately today, such as identity, academic background, home address, credit history , facial recognition, for example. while respecting the highest standards of regulation and data protection.
“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,” said Odegbami.
The $1.5 million investment round will help Youverify improve its technology and accelerate business development in Nigeria and the continent.
“Matters of security and access to financial or telecommunications services should never be at odds with each other. Telecom operators like Orange are at the forefront of these transformational 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,” said Grégoire de Padirac, Investment Manager at ODV.
Since its launch in Lagos in 2018, Youverify has already performed more than 300,000 customer registrations and verifications for some of Nigeria’s largest banks and financial companies.
Orange Digital Ventures is a 150 million euros early-stage tech fund which invests globally. It finances disruptive start-ups in the fields of connectivity and networks, enterprise SaaS (Cloud, AI, Big Data, and Cybersecurity) Fintech and Internet of Things. Backed by the Orange group, the fund provides “smart money” by facilitating synergies with its various business units and its 263 million customers in 29 countries.
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