Orange Digital Ventures, ODV Africa has announced its latest investment on the African continent by leading the $1.5m seed investment round in Youverify.
The start-up, founded in Lagos, Nigeria automates identity and background verification processes, primarily serving financial and telecommunication service providers.
Youverify is 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 with verification tasks remaining complex and manual for the major players like fintech and large corporate and the rise of RegTech companies, such as Youverify is key for the market in order to speed up and simplify these tasks.
Youverify CEO and Co-founder, Gbenga Odegbami said the company is aimed at helping 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.
Odegbami said it constitutes a unique opportunity for them to take further their ambition to simplify and secure their client’s internal processes, whether in the recruitment of staff, customer onboarding etc.
He said their 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.
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.
Reacting, ODV Investment Manager, Grégoire de Padirac said they are proud to support Youverify, which intends to resolve the triple objective of fostering financial inclusion, strengthening security and preserving user rights over their data.
Padirac stressed that since their launch in Lagos in 2018, Youverify has performed more than 300,000 customer registrations and verifications for some of Nigeria’s largest banks and financial companies, according to the report by appAfrica.
