Dojah joins Y Combinator W22 cohort, embarks on pan-African expansion

Dojah, a unified KYC and digital onboarding solution company will participate in the Y Combinator Winter 2022 (YC W22) cohort.

YC is one of the de facto launchpads for African startups. So getting into YC accelerator programme is considered a mark of validation. The team at Dojah is already experiencing the benefits of having the Silicon Valley accelerator's stamp of approval.

According to Ayomide Oso, co-founder and Product Lead at Dojah, "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".

Launched in 2005, YC brings together over 100 startups from across the world to Silicon Valley twice a year (winter and summer) for a three-month accelerator programme that culminates into a Demo Day.

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Founded in 2021 by  Tobi Ololade and Ayomide Oso, the Lagos-based startup has the single goal of empowering scale and innovation for businesses in Africa, so that more lives are impacted through technology by providing a unified KYC and digital onboarding solution for organizations looking to scale across Africa.

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.

Dojah intends to solve the challenges experienced during interactions with verifiable identity and financial data by aggregating and standardizing digital onboarding and KYC APIs across the continent, therefore providing a single gateway for startups looking to scale across borders.

Burdened by challenges like low internet penetration, financial exclusion, poverty, harsh economic climates and unpredictable governmental policies, scaling across Africa remains a daunting task for startups and companies looking to expand into the continent.

Before founding Dojah, Ololade and Oso were colleagues at 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. The duo identified the possibilities Dojah intends to achieve while working on a project at their former workplace.

"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", Ololade stated.

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Dojah aims to build a one-stop shop for onboarding users (individuals and businesses) anywhere on the continent. With the YC Demo day underway, Dojah has a few other goals in sight — a pan-African expansion and also 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.