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African ID Verification Platform Smile Raised $20 Million Funding in Series B

Smile Identity, a provider of digital identity verification solutions for Africa, has secured $20 million in Series B funding.

The round was co-led by Costanoa and Norrsken22. Additional new investments came from Commerce Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Two Culture Capital, and Latitude. Existing investors Valuestream Ventures, Intercept Ventures and Future Africa also joined the round. Lexi Novitske from Norrsken22 will also be joining our Board.

This follows their Series A, which brings their total funding to over $30 million.

In the past year, the company doubled their customer base and tripled revenues. As highlighted in tjeor 2022 annual KYC report, Smile Identity has now completed an estimated 50 million KYC and identity verification checks for hundreds of clients, solidifying our position as Africa’s experts in digital identity.

The company claims that they have 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.

Use of Series B

The company plans to use the money for the following projects:

1. Engineering and Product innovation

They are expanding our product & engineering team in Africa and globally, accelerating the development and specialization of our AI-powered biometrics, document verification, anti-fraud solutions and data access.

2. International Expansion and Localization

Smile is completing their Pan-African reach by building new teams in Francophone and North Africa, with a focus on local language support, compliance and UX optimization.

3. Long-term commitments to identity ecosystems

They commit 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.

Featured image credit: Mark Straub CEO of Smile Identity. Background image edited from Unsplash