Address verification are one of the most difficult jobs that individuals who work from home must complete in order to establish the legitimacy of their address.
Companies benefit from smart address technology because it reduces verification time and improves the accuracy of information based on data gathered from numerous sources.
OkHi is employing this technology to address these difficulties in Nigeria, and the company has secured a $1.5 million seed funding to help it expand. The current round brings the total seed funding raised by the company to $3 million.
Flutterwave’s founder and executives, Chapel Hill Denham, and EXFI, a syndicate of ex-Googlers, are among the investors in the round.
Timbo Drayson founded the company in 2014 in Nairobi, Kenya. Its technologies allow banks, fintechs, and businesses to collect and verify customer addresses using their cellphones, removing the need for utility bills and in-person interactions. It is the world’s only smart address verification service with smartphone functionality, according to the company.
OkHi’s service connects to a mobile banking or fintech app, allowing them to collect and verify their customers’ accurate addresses digitally.
Drayson claims that the business is in talks with 15 other banks and fintech companies, with plans to expand in the coming months. He also stated that OkHi would offer its address verification and collection services to industries such as last-mile deliveries, e-commerce, food delivery, and emergency services in order to diversify its customer base.
Customers are billed on a transaction-by-transaction basis by OkHi. When a business validates a customer’s address correctly, it is charged N500, or roughly $1. OkHi claims to have “hundreds of thousands” of users.
Companies from all over the world, including Egypt, India, South America, and Southeast Asia, are showing interest in Drayson’s company, he said.
However, despite having provided addresses in 54 countries to yet, the company is disregarding requests to formally grow in those areas in order to focus on Nigeria, where it wants to reach 1 million members in the next six months.
OkHi wants to hire quickly across engineering, sales, products, and engineering to accelerate customer and B2B development, and the investment will be critical to accomplishing that goal. OkHi is expanding its primarily remote team, with employees in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and London.