Orange Digital Ventures Africa (ODV) has led a $1.5m seed investment round in Youverify. a start-up, founded in Lagos, Nigeria which 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.

Grégoire de Padirac, Investment Manager at ODV, said: “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,” he said.

The investment round will help Youverify improve its technology and accelerate business development in Nigeria and the continent.

Co-founded by Gbenga Odegbami, the company’s CEO, Youverify aims to help companies automate the verification processes of different types of data treated seperately today, such as identity, academic background, home address, credit history, facial recognition, for example, 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 Gbenga Odegbami.

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.

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.