Africa’s identity problem is hiding in plain sight. Close to a billion people on the continent have no formal identification. The economies growing fastest are also the ones most exposed to synthetic fraud, spoofed biometrics, and data enrolment failures that make fraud almost impossible to trace. The infrastructure meant to stop all of this is fragmented, under-resourced, and working against a patchwork of data laws that sometimes bear no relationship to the physical reality of the countries that passed them.
Lanre Ogungbe, alongside his two co-founders, has spent the last four years building inside that contradiction. Prembly started as something else — a biometric payments play — and became, through market pressure and what its founder calls an accidental build, one of the more serious fraud prevention and identity infrastructure companies on the continent. It now operates across 35 countries, is profitable, and is closing in on $10 million ARR.
In this conversation, Ogungbe speaks with unusual directness about what it actually takes to scale compliance infrastructure across jurisdictions with conflicting regulations, what the data from FraudLens is revealing about fraud patterns that confound conventional assumptions, and why the structural barriers facing African tech founders — currency volatility, non-exportable products, inconsistent investor standards — are systemic rather than personal. It is a conversation about infrastructure, but also about honesty: about what the African tech ecosystem gets wrong in how it talks about itself.
Launch Base Africa: Lanre, thanks for joining us. Prembly is one of the more interesting identity infrastructure companies on the continent — you started the journey in 2021 through Y Combinator, made the pivotal Peleza acquisition attempt in Kenya, and have been building ever since. Let’s get into it.
Lanre Ogungbe: Thanks, Charles. I’m Lanre, CEO and co-founder of Prembly. We sit squarely in the fraud prevention and compliance space — working with hundreds of businesses across insurance, financial services, and money markets to stop identity fraud and help them meet their regulatory obligations.
Founding Story
Launch Base Africa: Having gone through Johns Hopkins Business School and built what is now consequential identity infrastructure, what is your personal conviction about this mission? Is there a specific moment — a fraud case, a regulatory encounter — that made you feel this was worth a decade of your life?
Lanre Ogungbe: My conviction rests on three pillars.
The first is the scale of digital economic growth on the continent. Rapid population growth brings enormous new challenges that need to be solved — fraud prevention, financial inclusion, and the infrastructure underneath all of it.
The second is the infrastructure gap itself. Governments tend to focus on physical infrastructure, leaving the digital layer to private players. That gap is an opportunity to build something consequential.
The third is the possibility of connecting multiple economies together — building something that crosses borders and creates real integration.
As for a personal story: the company we built wasn’t the company we set out to build. We initially wanted to work on biometric payments. But as we started talking to banks and financial institutions, we kept hearing the same thing — fraud was rampant, and nobody was solving verification in a way that worked. So we built something for ourselves, showed it to a couple of businesses, and they bought it immediately. That was the moment. We called it an accidental build, but once we saw the demand, we doubled down.
The Regulatory and Data Sharing Landscape
Launch Base Africa: One of Africa’s persistent structural problems is data fragmentation — companies protecting silos, regulations varying by country, and a reluctance to share. What is the biggest barrier to scaling FraudLens across jurisdictions? Are partners willing to share data, and where does regulatory resistance show up most acutely?
Lanre Ogungbe: There are a few distinct problems worth separating.
On regulation, the core challenge is fragmentation — not just across countries, but sometimes within them. My view is that you either over-regulate and make innovation prohibitively expensive, or you set clear, principled standards and create room for innovation within them. You cannot do both. Several countries have imported GDPR frameworks wholesale, which at least creates a baseline — if you’re GDPR-compliant, you’re largely covered across a significant portion of the continent. But then you have countries with bespoke laws, and the most common one is data localisation: citizen data cannot leave the country’s borders. In principle, that’s a reasonable policy. In practice, if that country has no functioning data centres — and some don’t — the regulation creates an impossible situation. The infrastructure reality and the legal framework are simply not aligned.
We operate across roughly 35 countries and work closely with regulators in most of them, even where we’re not physically present. The cost of navigating this patchwork is real.
On partner transparency, in our experience, partners become willing to share data when three things are true: first, the purpose of the data exchange is clear and demonstrably beneficial; second, they’re confident in our technical capacity to protect it; and third, we hold the appropriate licences in every jurisdiction where we operate. When those conditions are met, resistance largely disappears.
FraudLens: What the Data Is Revealing
Launch Base Africa: AI-enabled fraud is accelerating — deepfakes bypassing biometric checks, synthetic identities defeating KYC. What has FraudLens uncovered that your previous products couldn’t see? And what has it done for the business?
Lanre Ogungbe: FraudLens has surprised us in several ways.
The first surprise was the appetite for data sharing. We expected cautious uptake. Instead, within two weeks of launch, we went from hundreds of reported cases to thousands. Businesses were clearly waiting for a mechanism like this — they were already exhausted by fraud and understood that collective intelligence was the answer.
The second finding is about geography. Conventional wisdom assumes fraud concentrates in major urban centres. The data says otherwise. We’re seeing significant fraud activity in smaller, less-populated cities — which changes how you have to think about detection and intervention.
The third, and perhaps the most structurally important, is about data quality at the point of enrolment. Whether we’re talking about birth certificates, passports, or driver’s licences, errors at enrolment create the conditions for synthetic fraud. When someone is using a real face with another person’s biometric data, tracing that fraud back to an individual becomes nearly impossible. If we don’t fix foundational data enrolment, upstream fraud prevention will always be fighting a losing battle.
On the business side, the impact has been substantial. We’ve reached full profitability as a group, which meaningfully reduces our dependence on external capital. Our customer base has grown a minimum of 170% month-on-month since we launched new products in Q4 last year. We’re processing around seven million unique verifications per month, up from 4.7 million. And we’re close to $10 million ARR — I expect we’ll be there by the end of the year.
M&A, Competition, and Localisation
Launch Base Africa: The Peleza merger was meant to create an east-west axis — Kenya plus Nigeria. It didn’t go through as planned. What happened, and what did that teach you? And how do you think about competition, given how crowded the identity verification space has become?
Lanre Ogungbe: The Peleza rationale was straightforward. They had years of experience in background checks in the Kenyan market; we had deeper technology in identity verification. Rather than build from scratch in a market we were new to, it made sense to combine. What we didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to merge two cultures. The strategic logic was sound; the operational reality was not. We were honest with ourselves, called it, and went back to building a local team from the ground up.
The lesson, which we now apply across every market we enter, is that localisation is non-negotiable. The way you run operations in Namibia is fundamentally different from South Africa, even within the same economic bloc. We had initially assumed a standardised operational model could travel across markets. It can’t.
On competition: we no longer think of ourselves as a verification company, so the competitive frame has shifted. We are an infrastructure and fraud prevention layer — verification is one component, but we’ve moved into transaction monitoring, transaction fraud prevention, and data-sharing intelligence through FraudLens. Direct comparisons to other KYC providers increasingly miss the point.
As for consolidation, I expect international players — European or American — will be the ones to drive meaningful M&A before local players reach that stage. Local players are increasingly interconnected at the backend, even where they appear separate to customers, similar to how credit bureaus operate. That quiet integration will deepen over time.
Fundraising, Exits, and Investor Dynamics
Launch Base Africa: You’re approaching $10 million ARR and are profitable. How do you think about a Series A, and when? The broader exit question is also live — investors increasingly argue that the onus for liquidity events falls on founders. Do you agree?
Lanre Ogungbe: Our position is relatively comfortable. Several existing investors are looking to double down, and we’ve had inbound interest from new VCs. For the past 18 months, we deliberately deprioritised fundraising conversations to focus on the business — and that decision has paid off. We’ll be taking those conversations more seriously over the next few months. We haven’t set a hard closing timeline because profitability means we’re not under pressure.
On exits: the concern is genuine, and I hear it clearly. But I’d push back on the idea that it sits entirely at the founder’s table. VCs have a role to play in facilitating consolidation — they often have the relationships, the portfolio visibility, and the standing to broker conversations that founders, who are deep in day-to-day operations, may not have the bandwidth to initiate. Some of the best exits won’t happen organically; they’ll require someone actively brokering. I think that’s an underused lever. That said, yes — founders need to build with exits in mind. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
African Tech on the Global Stage
Launch Base Africa: African investors are increasingly backing companies that happen to operate in emerging markets but are led by non-Africans. Very few Sub-Saharan African companies have reached the $500 million valuation threshold. Is this a product-market problem, a currency problem, or something else? And isn’t there a double standard in pressuring African startups at Seed stage to expand regionally, when Uber and Airbnb raised billions before entering Africa?
Lanre Ogungbe: Both things are true, and they’re worth taking seriously.
On the scale question: currency is the primary structural constraint. In most of Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest economies, currency volatility means your balance sheet can deteriorate dramatically over a three to five year horizon, regardless of how well the business performs. Predictable financial projections — the kind that attract institutional capital and support public listings — require monetary stability that most African markets simply don’t offer. You can’t list on the London Stock Exchange or NYSE if your local currency numbers don’t translate. This isn’t a founder failure; it’s a macroeconomic reality.
On product exportability: much of what we build solves problems that don’t exist in developed markets. Biometric identification, for instance, is central to our business because close to a billion people on this continent have no formal ID documents. That problem simply doesn’t appear in Europe or the United States. You can export variants of solutions, but the core problem isn’t portable.
On the double standard: you’re right, and it’s worth stating plainly. Fewer than 15 US tech companies operate in Africa. Uber and Airbnb raised hundreds of billions before ever looking at this market. Yet African founders at Seed or Series A are routinely pressured to expand across three or four countries simultaneously. That’s an unfair and inconsistent standard, and it needs to be called out.
Co-Founder Dynamics
Launch Base Africa: About sixty-five percent of startup failures trace back to co-founder conflict. How have you managed it at Prembly which has three co-founders?
Lanre Ogungbe: We’ve had our share — I’d argue the number is probably higher than 65% when you look honestly at the data.
A few things have helped us. First, we treat each other as employees of the business, not just as co-founders. The same standards, accountability structures, and expectations apply to everyone, including me. Second, we’ve been deliberate about letting people operate in their areas of strength and trusting them to do so — even when that means accepting mistakes. Third, we formed our board in the first year and have held quarterly board meetings almost without exception. That accountability structure keeps everyone aligned and surfaces conflict before it compounds. Shareholder agreements and clear documentation matter, but the board dynamic has probably been the single most useful governance tool we’ve built.
Looking Back
Launch Base Africa: What advice would you give yourself five years ago?
Lanre Ogungbe: Three things.
First, let go of operations earlier. In the early years, I was too involved in day-to-day execution because I didn’t trust the team enough to make — and learn from — their own mistakes. That instinct costs you leverage as the company grows.
Second, take breaks, and let your team take them too. Fatigue in leadership travels horizontally across an organisation. The grind culture that startups celebrate has real costs, and the ripple effects of a burnt-out leadership team are underestimated.
Third, take more risk. There are decisions we held back on that, in hindsight, we should have moved on faster. We’re making up for that now, but earlier conviction would have been worth it.
Launch Base Africa: Lanre, thanks — this has been a genuinely interesting conversation. We wish Prembly the best.
Lanre Ogungbe: Thank you, Charles.