Identitypass, a Nigerian Know Your Customers (KYC) verification startup, has closed $2.8 million seed funding led by Marc Ventures Capital.
The round was backed by Y Combinator, Soma Capital, True Capital Fund, Sherwani Capital LP, and other unnamed venture funds. The startup has now raised $3.1 million in external funding.
Founded in January 2021 by Lanre Ogungbe, Niyi Adegboye, and David Obi, Identitypass provides an easy-to-use compliance and data security platform that helps with identity verification solutions for online businesses to easily authenticate and validate the genuineness of a transacting party to avoid being scammed.
With the investment, Identitypass plans to expand its existing infrastructure, roll out new verticals around compliance, security and data collection, push into new African countries and make new hires to its 14-man team.
The startup has processed more than 1 million unique verifications since launch. These end points are government-approved IDs, such as national IDs, driver licenses, international passports, bank verification numbers (BVN), phone numbers, vehicle plate numbers, debit cards, security watchlists and tax history. Depending on the number of end points a business connects to, the identity and verification platform charges between 10 cents to 20 cents on every verification it executes.
“Before we came into the market, someone could pick another person’s BVN and use that to assess a loan facility,” said Ogungbe explaining why Identitypass takes a lot of data points into cognizance. “But with technologies like ours, we can do this kind of verification to tell that the person submitting the BVN, phone number or bank details isn’t the owner.”
