Youverify closes additional $1 million seed to verify 2 billion identities
Currently, the company operates in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda and plans to expand its footprint to 30 countries over the next 18 months
Youverify, a Lagos and San Francisco–based identity verification startup, has announced this week a $1 million seed round extension to expand the number of identities it can verify from 400 million to 2 billion. In 2020, the company raised a $1.5 million seed, bringing its total seed funding to $2.5 million.
Orange Digital Ventures (ODV) and LoftyInc Capital led the extension round. Octerra Capital, Plug & Play Venture, Syntax Ventures, HTTP Investors, Afer Group, and Fronesyz Capital also participated.Gbenga Odegbami, CEO and Founder, launched Youverify in 2018 to provide API for address and identity verification to various financial institutions.
Youverify helps African banks and startups automate Know Your Customer (KYC) and other compliance procedures by combining KYC and compliance products such as transaction monitoring to address issues such as Antimoney Laundering (AML) and fraud. It fights fraud by detecting fraudulent transaction patterns, blocking virtual cards, and tracing them back to the perpetrators of multiple false chargebacks.
Currently, the company operates in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda and 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.
