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Smile Identity
Africa-focused verification platform
- 21-100 employees
- B2B
- Security
- Deep Tech
- Computer Vision
- Machine Learning
- Financial Services
- SaaS
- Identity
- Produce and Waterfront, Oakland, CA
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Company mission
Smile Identity's mission is to make the benefits of a modern digital lifestyle universally accessible by expanding trust in underserved markets.
15% employee growth in 12 months
Our take
An estimated half a billion Africans have no access to formal identification, cutting them off from essential services. Smile Identity uses artificial intelligence to provide ID verification and Know Your Client (KYC) compliance for African financial institutions.
Smile’s product-market fit took some time. With no playbook to follow, it continues to carve out innovative solutions for a systematically overlooked community. Within four years of conception, Smile existed across six markets in Africa, covering over 250 million identities and verification for 15 different types of IDs, whilst delivering over one million identity checks each month - successfully securing its goal of reaching underserved markets.
Whilst competitor Youverify claims to be the market leader in ID verification, Smile is growing its market position, and is used by many fast growing companies across a wide range of industries. With integrations to more ID databases than any other KYC provider in Africa, and fresh funding for expanding its product and engineering teams, Smile Identity has proved its abilities and positioned itself well to expand into the future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Benefits
- Referral Bonus
- Offices in Cape Town, London, Nairobi and Lagos
- Annual off-site & quarterly regional hangouts
- Company sponsored health insurance plans or medical stipend where applicable
- Annual salary reviews
- Flexible hours and remote/hybrid work
- Paid time-off - our comprehensive leave policy caters to different leave types
- Annual learning budget
Company values
- We are Seekers of Truth – Whether it is the real identity of a person or the source of a partner's problem, we are always proactively seeking the most truthful answers.
- We Own the Outcome – We are not afraid to fail. We believe that we can only learn from our mistakes allowing us to dream big.
- We Obsess over our Partners Success – We love seeing our partners making huge strides in Africa, so we ensure that we make it easy for them to grow and scale exponentially.
- We Build for Scale – We are always looking at the future and coming up with solutions and processes that will stand the test of time.
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2023
$20m
SERIES B
Jul 2021
$7m
SERIES A
Total funding: $35m
This company has top investors
Leadership
Mark Straub
(CEO)Khosla Impact Partner. Former Analyst at Banc of America Securities and India-based microfinance venture firm Lok Capital. Before co-founding Smile Identity they were an Associate & Analyst for the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund.
William Bares
(Senior Advisor)Was the company's CTO from foundation, stepping into an advisory role in 2022. Previously spent seven years as VP Software and System Engineering at Verayo.