Orange Digital Ventures led a $1.5 million investment round in Youverify, a digital identity and address verification start-up based in Lagos.
The company automates identity and background verification processes, primarily serving financial and telcos. Youverify is the fifth company in Orange Group’s African investment initiative.
Financial and mobile payment services continue to proliferate in Africa but verification tasks remain complex and manual. Youverify aims to speed up and simplify these tasks through automating the verification processes of different types of data such as identity, academic background, home address, credit history and facial recognition, in line with regulation and data protection.
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Triple objective
Grégoire de Padirac, Investment Manager at Orange Digital Ventures, 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.”
The $1.5 million investment round will be used to help Youverify improve its technology and accelerate business development in Nigeria and Africa.
“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, Youverify’s CEO.
Money in Morocco
Having secured approval last summer from the Bank Al Maghrib, Orange Morocco is launching Orange Money in the kingdom. This service will allow Moroccans to make mobile payments and transfer money using their phones. Morocco is the eighteenth country in Africa and Middle East to offer the Orange Money solution.