Orange Digital Ventures leads $1.5m investment round in Nigeria's Youverify

Orange Digital Ventures Africa announces its latest investment on the African continent by leading the $1.5m seed investment round in Youverify.

The start-up, founded in Lagos, 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. 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.

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 and facial recognition 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 Youverify co-founder and CEO Gbenga 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 Orange Digital Ventures.

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