Led · Seed · Sep 2021

Edves operates a proprietary education platform that digitizes school operations and uses AI to track attendance and plan classroom courses. The company says it is the largest education portal for K-12 users in Africa and was founded in 2016. The platform is operating in almost 800 schools across Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe and has a presence in three countries. Edves will use the seed funding to enhance existing products and launch new ones to meet growing customer demand. Management frames the product as reducing teacher and administrative labour and improving every area of school operations. The startup plans to continue expanding across other African countries. Edves offers an academic-portal platform that automates school operations — admission processing, one-click result and record generation, and transcript generation. The platform supports cash and cashless payments, includes thousands of e-books, video tutorials, and virtual classrooms. It provides educators with automated workflows and affordable data storage, while parents can track student performance via SMS, email, web and a mobile app. The product targets schools and colleges and requires little or no IT skill to use. According to the article, the service is used by over 340 schools in Nigeria. Earlier in the year the startup won the Transforming Education in Emerging Markets prize at the Seedstars Summit in Switzerland.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2021

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.