Smile Identity Acquires Appruve To Deepen Reach Across Africa

Today, Smile Identity announced that it has acquired Appruve’s parent company (Inclusive Innovations, Inc.) and is actively fulfilling regulatory requirements to finalise the transaction for the affiliated entities in Africa. This strategic acquisition will expand Smile Identity’s footprint across Africa and solidify its position as the continent’s leading identity verification and digital KYC provider.

The acquisition of Appruve will result in an expanded suite of APIs, including mobile money, data, and anti-fraud checks, providing customers with a more comprehensive digital identity verification solution. The combined entity seeks to cover over 1 billion Africans, the African diaspora, and 100 million African businesses, supporting over 230 documents and data types with integration options for every device and operating system combination in Africa. Smile Identity will also deepen its presence in Ghana and expand into francophone Africa with a focus on Cote D’Ivoire and Senegal. 

Appruve is a pan-African identity verification platform that enables financial services to onboard and verify their customers, both individuals and businesses. Smile Identity helps clients mitigate fraud and onboard new customers more efficiently.  The startup has a combination of different products: identity verification, digital KYC, user onboarding, liveness checks, face verification, document verification and anti-fraud checks, but most importantly, identity data deduplication.