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Youverify Announces $2.5 million pre-Series A investment from a Saudi Arabian Company
By Oluchukwu Ikemefuna
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Youverify, a Nigerian organization that provides id verification and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions for banks and startups has secured a whopping sum of $2.5 million in funding in a pre-Series A round.
The funding was secured from Elm, an organization that specializes in delivering ready-made and customized digital solutions to public and private institutions in the MENA region.
The Partnership Between Youverify and Elm
The pre-Series A funding from the Sudan Arabia company also includes a strategic alliance to help Youverify streamline AML compliance for businesses, strengthen global risk intelligence, and introduce its products into new markets.
Youverify had secured a $1 million seed round extension in 2022. This was after raising a $1.5 million round in 2020, bringing its total seed raise to $2.5 million.
About Youverify
Gbenga Odegbami (CEO) founded Youverify in 2018 to provide an API for address and identity validation to many institutions. Since then, the company has expanded its real-time business verification operation into 145 jurisdictions in 48 nations.
The company also oversees individual verification in 46 countries, which includes credit history and national identity numbers.
The startup reportedly exceeded its original plan to expand its service coverage to 30 African countries, a goal the company set during its seed extension round in 2022.
Elm Speaks On The Partnership
VP of Elm Investment, Fahad bin Issa Ibrahim Al-Shathry, said: “We are excited to partner with Youverify, a company that shares our vision for leveraging technology to solve critical challenges faced by businesses today.
He further said “This collaboration is a testament to our dedication to collaborating with exceptional founders through investing in a budding technology ecosystem not only in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but also globally to drive efficiency, security, and trust.”
The Startup Progress In The Industry
However, Youverify only serves commercial customers in 12 countries, processing 4 million applications per month for over 3,500 companies. This represents a significant increase from the 5 million applications it reportedly processed annually for 400 businesses in 2022.
“Individuals and businesses can verify their identity, registration status and ownership using their government data through Youverify. This is not the generic OCR-based KYC, which uses image recognition to validate the ID presented to it. In addition, we launched our anti-money laundering and risk classification product to address some of these industries,” said Odegbami.
Conclusion
According to Youverify, they utilize a range of reliable data sources such as government sanctions and watchlists, global news outlets’ sentiment data, country-risk models, and commercially accessible data to make well-informed decisions regarding AML-related risks. The platform competes with other companies such as Dojah, Identitypass, and Smile Identity. Youverify assesses and analyzes risks using established mathematical models and AI algorithms. The outcome is regulatory reports that can be submitted to regulators in multiple countries.
