Dojah, a KYC and onboarding platform startup ,becomes the latest in the rising list of Nigerian startups to get into the much-vaunted Silicon Valley accelerator—YCombinator.
Led by Tobi Ololade and Ayomide Oso, the Lagos-based startup is looking to provide a unified KYC and digital onboarding solution for organizations looking to scale across Africa. Scaling across Africa remains a daunting task for startups and companies looking to expand into the continent, especially due to the fragmented regulatory and technological landscape. Getting verifiable identity and financial data often means having to integrate with multiple service providers, which is tasking and time-consuming. Dojah is looking to solve this problem by aggregating and standardizing digital onboarding and KYC APIs across the continent, therefore providing a single gateway for startups looking to scale across borders.
Prior to working at Dojah, Tobi and Ayomide, co-founders of the startup, worked at Elta Solutions— a dev shop that serviced software companies. Tobi was also the CTO at Tradebuza, a data and API infrastructure for agriculture finance. It was during the time at Elta solutions that the team identified the problem that Dojah would go on to solve.
“We were building a product called Expensa—an expense and income-management product for Africans. While building it, we found it difficult to get the data APIs we needed. We had to reach out to stakeholders individually to get the APIs and it made building very slow. We quickly figured this was not a unique problem to us, and we carried out some user research to confirm our hypothesis. That was how Dojah started.” Tobi shared.
Dojah aims to build a one-stop shop for onboarding users (individuals and businesses) anywhere on the continent. Just prior to getting into the YC 2022 batch, the startup had reached new milestones by integrating onboarding and KYC endpoints for 5 African countries —Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda. The startup has also onboarded over 500 businesses and processed over 2 million API calls.
Getting into YCombinator has, in recent times, come to be regarded as a launchpad for African startups and, a mark of validation that the startup is indeed worth watching. The team at Dojah is already experiencing the benefits of having the stamp of approval of the Silicon-valley accelerator.
“Getting into YC has been a tremendous boost for us. It has already been instrumental in helping us ease conversations with critical stakeholders. We are excited for what the future holds for us. Our growth translates to more growth for the African Startups. As we find the means to onboard users across more countries, African startups would have entrance to these countries also.” Ayomide Oso, Product lead and co-founder, said.
As it prepares for the YC Demo day in a few weeks, Dojah has a few other goals in sight. The startup is looking to expand its reach to more countries soon. It also plans to deepen the distribution of its no-code solutions to help non-developers with scalable businesses build out their onboarding and KYC flows across the continent.
