Africa-Focused Verification Platform, Smile Identity, Raises $20 Million After Doubling Customer Base and Tripling Revenue

Smile Identity, one of the leading providers of digital identity verification solutions for Africa, has announced that it has secured $20 million in Series B funding.

The round was Co-led by:

• Costanoa and
• Norrsken22

with additional new investments from:

• Commerce Ventures
• Courtside Ventures
• Two Culture Capital
• Latitude

Existing investors:

• Valuestream Ventures
• Intercept Ventures, and
• Future Africa

also joined the round.

With this latest round of funding, Smile Identity’s total funding now stands at over $30 million since its founding. Lexi Novitske from Norrsken22 will also be joining the Smile Identity board, CEO, Mark Straub, wrote.

According to Straub, in the past year, Smile Identity has doubled its customer base and tripled revenues.

The company has completed an estimated 50 million Know Your Customer (KYC) and identity verification checks for hundreds of clients, solidifying its position as Africa’s experts in digital identity.

Smile Identity has integrations to more ID databases than any other KYC provider in Africa and provides compliance and anti-fraud solutions to many of the continent’s champions in banking, lending, payments, remittances, cryptocurrency and the shared economy.

In 2022, Smile Identity released a KYC report detailing the rate of fraud in Africa. The report revealed that crypto experienced the lowest cases of fraud despite a 30% increase in KYC onboarding fraud in Africa.

The company has also made important announcements over the past year, including the introduction of Document Verification, which allows Smile Identity to provide global ID coverage, and Know Your Business (KYB), an API to check information on companies, directors, and beneficial owners.

The company has also opened new offices in London and Cape Town adding to Lagos and Nairobi, a move that is meant to expand the firm’s reach and in-person support for its clients.

With the new funding, Smile Identity plans to invest further in 3 areas:

• First, the company is expanding its product and engineering team in Africa and globally, accelerating the development and specialization of its AI-powered biometrics, document verification, anti-fraud solutions, and data access
• Second, Smile Identity is completing its Pan-African reach by building new teams in Francophone and North Africa, with a focus on local language support, compliance, and user experience optimization
• Finally, the company is deepening its commitment to the local ecosystem by enforcing African data protection laws with pre-built consent layers and integration methods that fulfill local requirements, and by sharing anonymized metrics and insights on fraud trends across Africa

Smile Identity’s CEO expressed gratitude for the support of the company’s customers and investors and underscored the company’s dedication to securing the infrastructure for digital Africa.

He added that the company’s dream is to make Africans among the most trusted consumers in the world, and that this is possible by combining best-in-class technology with good policy frameworks and modern identity infrastructure.