Youverify, a Lagos and San Francisco–based identity verification startup, has announced a $1 million seed round extension to expand the number of identities it can verify from 400 million to 2 billion.
The extension round was led by Orange Digital Ventures (ODV) and LoftyInc Capital. Octerra Capital, Plug & Play Venture, Syntax Ventures, HTTP Investors, Afer Group, and Fronesyz Capital also participated. In 2020, the company raised a $1.5 million seed, bringing its total seed funding to $2.5 million.
The company plans to expand its footprint to 30 countries over the next 18 months, focusing on the southern, eastern, and francophone parts of Africa, where the CEO says the company will be “recruiting aggressively.”
It also plans to create new automated compliance products for the gaming, travel, healthcare, and telecommunications industries.
Gbenga Odegbami, CEO and Founder, launched Youverify in 2018 to provide API for address and identity verification to various financial institutions.
Youverify facilitates the automation of Know Your Customer (KYC) and other compliance procedures for African banks and startups, combining KYC and compliance products like transaction monitoring to address issues like anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud.
It combats fraud by identifying transaction patterns to flag fraud, blocking virtual cards, and tracing them back to the perpetrators of multiple false chargebacks.
To better serve its clients, the company launched Youverify OS (YVOS), its proprietary technology.
Youverify OS provides a single platform for automating due diligence. It combines risk and compliance management with its core identity verification platform to give fintechs an enterprise-grade compliance solution.
Further, businesses can use a drag-and-drop builder to create a custom process for onboarding new customers with its other product, vFORM, a low and no-code tool.
Youverify claims to have increased its customer base by 300% to serve over 400 banks and high-growth startups.
It also says its application processes have grown by more than 1,000%, with over 5 million applications helping its clients hire talent, sell financial products, and remotely onboard ride-hailing drivers in the last year.
Besides, Youverify’s YouID digital identity platform added over 500,000 users, with 600 service providers on the continent’s marketplace waitlist. The company says its Accounting Rate of Return (ARR) exceeded $1 million last year.
Currently, the company operates in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.