When Zita Agwunobi first sketched out the idea of Iverify.ng, she was staking more than a business bet. She was staking a claim: that in Nigeria, a woman could found, lead, and scale a digital identity and background screening company in a space dominated by male, capital entrenched institutions, and skeptical clients. Six years later, Iverify.ng has more than survived; it is reshaping expectations for entrepreneurs in digital identity across Africa and beyond.

Early Vision and Foundations
Iverify.ng began operations in Nigeria in 2019, before the arrival of COVID-19, as the country’s first female-owned and led digital identity and background check company. That timing gave it both challenges and opportunities. As the pandemic forced processes online, the demand for secure, fraud-resistant verification grew. Iverify.ng moved quickly to position itself as a trusted partner for organizations that needed to know who was on the other side of a transaction, whether a job applicant, a vendor, or a corporate customer.

From the outset, Agwunobi understood that trust would be Iverify.ng’s currency. She established the company as a fully incorporated Nigerian entity, a licensed data processor, and a registered trademark. It also became a member of the Professional Background Screening Association. These steps signaled early seriousness about compliance, privacy, and standards.

Accelerator Momentum
In its early years, Iverify.ng leveraged accelerator and mentorship programmes to refine its product, expand its network, and attract visibility. The company was accepted into a remarkable list of programmes, including HiiL Justice Accelerator, Women in Technology by Standard Chartered Bank and the Enterprise Development Centre, Women in Technology Africa (WIA54), Google for Startups Accelerator, IFC/World Bank She Wins, HiiL Justice Scale Up, and the United Nations E-trade for Women. Each offered not just resources, tools, capital or prestige but access to advisors, peer networks, and markets. Participation in these accelerators became part of Iverify.ng’s proof to prospective clients that the business had been vetted and validated by credible institutions.

Growing Reach Across Africa
After consolidating its base in Nigeria, Iverify.ng broadened its footprint in 2022 to Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Africa. In each new market, it had to move carefully, integrating local regulatory compliance, forging partnerships with institutions, and adapting to local verification ecosystems through cross-border collaboration. This expansion allowed Iverify.ng to demonstrate not just a one-country success but a pan-African capability.

Such geographic scale matters in digital identity. Many institutions, including banks, HR firms, and real estate companies, operate across borders and need verification solutions that can handle regional variation. Iverify.ng’s presence in multiple African markets gave it the credibility to bid for larger contracts and deliver cross-country reports.

Services and Client Base
Iverify.ng’s clients today include commercial banks, organisations in real estate, HR consulting firms, oil and gas firms, leasing companies, and universities. This diversity is intentional. It allows the company to prove robustness in regulated sectors like banking, transaction-based sectors such as leasing and real estate, and people-centered sectors like HR and education. Each client type demands different verification modalities, from criminal record checks and certificate validation to employment history and guarantor verification. Because Iverify.ng is a B2B company, its growth is tied to enterprise wins, long-term contracts, and deep integration.

On the product side, Iverify.ng developed and deployed a secure verification cycle framework that cut credential fraud across its partner institutions by 40 percent. That metric alone has become a powerful sales tool. To support this performance, Iverify.ng built data-driven anomaly detection tools, improving detection accuracy and reducing manual review time. Over time, it has introduced dashboards, analytics, and ETL pipelines to improve visibility, reporting, and operational efficiency. Its reporting accuracy rose from 82 percent to 97 percent after cleaning and standardizing institutional data, and its protocols reduced verification delays by 30 percent.

By mid-2025, Iverify.ng had processed 1.2 million verifications across its markets and sustained roughly 15 percent year-on-year revenue growth. These numbers matter because they prove scale and persistence, attributes that investors and large clients look for in digital identity providers.

Kpali.ng: A New Strategic Product
In the first quarter of 2025, Iverify.ng launched a new product, Kpali.ng, a platform strictly focused on document and certificate verification. The rationale was twofold: first, to separate document verification as a lightweight, modular service, and second, to make that capability plug-and-play for clients who may not need full background checks. Kpali.ng allows institutions to validate academic certificates, professional credentials, licenses, and other documents quickly and reliably. Kpali.ng is led by Bolanle Agbage, the Head of Product and Operations. The launch signals Iverify’s shift from a one-size-fits-all verification service into a modular identity infrastructure provider.

Global Expansion: Leadership and Governance
In September 2025, Iverify.ng expanded to the United States, marking a bold move from African regional player to global aspirant. This milestone is positioned for Africa-connected background checks and verification, spotlighting our unique heritage and will serve as both a compliance gateway and a cultural ambassador, projecting Nigerian excellence, reliability, and innovation into the global verification ecosystem.

Alongside that geographic leap, the company appointed Tajudeen Abdullahi as Chief Operating Officer of Iverify Nigeria. Abdullahi brings operational rigour to Iverify.ng’s scaling efforts, overseeing verification workflows in Nigeria, partnerships, data operations, and client integrations between continents.

Under their joint leadership, Iverify.ng’s management team authored business strategy for Africa-connected background checks and cross border verifications through technology. They also led stakeholder engagement, ensuring that product roadmap decisions were anchored in market needs, regulatory expectations, and technical feasibility.

Strategic Partnerships and Institutional Alliances
Iverify.ng’s expansion has been shaped by partnerships. It forged strategic alliances with multinational organizations and B2B players that provided verification coverage across Nigeria and Africa. These collaborations helped Iverify reach clients beyond its own direct sales. The company also invested in institutional training, delivering sessions to client staff and stakeholders to promote adoption, trust, and correct usage of verification systems.

Its membership in the Professional Background Screening Association and its status as a licensed data processor further signal legitimacy to clients wary of regulatory or privacy risk. Iverify continually aligns its operations with data protection, institutional compliance, and global best practices.

Impact and Performance
The verification cycle framework that Iverify.ng designed is a differentiator. By embedding checks,QA , QC, balances, and feedback loops, it ensures consistency, reduces fraud risk, and enhances client confidence. That framework, coupled with data analytics, allows Iverify.ng to detect patterns, refine detection rules, and adjust thresholds in near real time.

Through interactive dashboards built with tools like Power BI and Tableau, Iverify.ng gives clients visibility into volume, turnaround time, and partner adoption metrics. Internally, those analytics drive product decisions such as which verifications to prioritize, where to invest in model improvement, or when to push clients toward automation.

Over time, the data shows patterns. Certain certificate types, countries, or institutions generate more anomalies or rejection flags. By analysing those patterns, Iverify.ng can adjust its rules, retrain models, or guide partners to standardise their records. That iterative, data-driven approach strengthens the core platform.

One tangible outcome is that credential fraud across partnered institutions dropped 40 percent. Time spent on manual reviews fell 25 percent. Delays in verification were reduced 30 percent by addressing null or incomplete data at the source. Standardising institutional reports improved reporting accuracy from 82 percent to 97 percent.

All this has enabled Iverify.ng to sustain moderate, investor-ready projections while growing revenue at about 15 percent annually.

Raising the Bar for Entrepreneurs
What makes Iverify.ng’s story worth telling is not just what it achieved but how it raises the bar for entrepreneurs in this sector. Many entrepreneurs in digital identity struggle with low margins, distrust, and infrastructure bottlenecks. Iverify.ng’s pathway suggests strategies to overcome those challenges.

First, founding legitimacy matters. From day one, Iverify.ng anchored itself in regulatory compliance, trademark protection, and industry association membership. That provided a credibility layer clients could trust.

Second, accelerator programs mattered. Each one, from HiiL to Google for Startups to Women in Tech, opened doors, introduced frameworks, and gave external validation. That made it easier for clients and investors to place faith in Iverify.ng.

Third, modularisation and product focus, exemplified by Kpali.ng, help expand addressable markets. Not all clients want full background screening; some only need certificate verification. By offering modular tools, Iverify.ng broadens its appeal.

Fourth, embedding data and analytics into operations turns verification from a checklist function into a learning function. Iverify.ng’s dashboards, root-cause analytics, ETL workflows, anomaly detection, and feedback loops let it improve over time rather than execute at a fixed quality level.

Fifth, disciplined stakeholder engagement matters. By involving institutional representatives in roadmap design, Iverify.ng aligns with client pain points, anticipates regulatory objections, and increases buy-in. That lowers resistance to adoption.

Sixth, cross-market expansion, from Nigeria to six African countries and then to the United States, subjects the business to rigorous stress tests. If Iverify.ng can survive regulatory, data, and market differences across Africa and then compete in the United States, its model is battle-tested. This leap alone shows that digital identity entrepreneurship in Africa can compete on the global stage.

Seventh, leadership continuity and clarity matter. The addition of a Chief Operating Officer with operational depth helps routinize and scale processes so that growth is not bottlenecked by founder bandwidth.

Challenges and the Road Ahead
Of course, Iverify.ng faces challenges. Digital identity is fraught with regulatory constraints, data privacy concerns, and competition from incumbents or global identity providers. Breaking into the United States market will require navigating complex privacy regimes such as CCPA, FCRA, HiPPA, GDPR’s equivalents, or sectoral rules, and competing against well-resourced local players. Ensuring consistent verification accuracy across jurisdictions with varying data quality is difficult. Maintaining customer trust and preventing breaches in a data-sensitive business is a perpetual risk.

Still, Iverify has built momentum, institutional credentials, and technical infrastructure to confront these risks.

Its story is, in many ways, a playbook for entrepreneurs who aim to build identity infrastructure. It shows that in a field where trust is essential, legitimacy cannot be an afterthought. It must be designed into the company’s DNA. It demonstrates that a female founder can lead in a domain often dominated by men and that early participation in global acceleration circuits can amplify local credibility.

Iverify.ng is no longer just a Nigerian success story. It is an African platform going global, with a new Chief Operating Officer helping to drive operational discipline and a product suite expanding into document verification. Through partnerships, data science, and regulatory seriousness, it pushes the stakes higher for any entrepreneur aiming to play in digital identity.

In doing so, Iverify is not just verifying identities; it is raising the bar for what a credible, scalable, trust-anchored digital identity business in Africa can look like.