Smile Identity offers a suite of identity-verification products including face verification, liveness checks, document verification, digital KYC, onboarding, anti-fraud checks and identity-data deduplication. The company launched in 2018 and was founded by Mark Straub and William Bares. It has expanded product coverage from ~250 million identities to capabilities the company says can cover over a billion identities and 230 ID types across 100+ countries via its Document Verification product. Smile Identity processed over 30 million identity verifications in 2021 (about half of its ~50 million total checks since inception) and performs roughly 2–2.5 million monthly checks; it serves over 100 businesses across banking, fintech, education, agriculture and e-commerce. The firm says it doubled its client base since 2021 and tripled revenues over the same period. Growth plans include ramping hiring across East, Southern and West Africa, expanding into Francophone and Arab-speaking countries, opening offices (including London and Cape Town) and partnering with ID authorities and governments to support consent standards and data-protection compliance. Smile Identity builds ID verification and KYC compliance tools tailored to African identities using de-biased face recognition, liveness checks and anti-fraud measures. Founded in 2017 by Mark Straub and William Bares, the company matches selfies against identity documents and photos held by ID authorities. It covers more than 250 million identities, supports over 15 ID types, performs over one million identity checks per month and serves about 80 customers charged on a per-query basis. Customers span banking, fintech, ride-sharing, worker verification, public social welfare programs and telecommunications, including Paystack, Paga, Chipper Cash, Kuda, Umba, Stanbic IBTC, Binance, Luno and Paxful. Smile Identity plans to use new funding to improve its services, expand into more markets, add support for additional ID types, and hire more engineers and support staff across Africa. The company is also building compliance templates and product features to help clients meet evolving local data-protection and consent requirements.

Total raised

$27M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Feb 2023