South African data startup Omnisient raises $3.5 million expansion round

Omnisient, a secure data collaboration platform, has raised a $3.5 million expansion round from a group of investors led by Buffet Investments, KLT and the Shoprite Group.

• Omnisient is a South African startup with focus on emerging markets. Using its bank grade cryptography system, it helps businesses to analyze and commercialize first-party datasets in a secure and neutral cloud environment.
• The startup claims that businesses using Omnisient can draw new insights on their own consumers beyond their engagement with their business or generate new revenue from data commercialization while protecting consumer privacy, because personally identifiable information is never shared or revealed.
• Omnisient has teamed up with Shoprite to use customer data to better understand and identify opportunities to create more value, such as improving financial inclusion for its unbanked customers.
• Data from the World Bank shows that up to 65% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are unbanked or lack access to formal credit. This partnership will enable Shoprite to provide consumption data for financial institutions as alternative data for credit scoring.
• The company serves more than 60 businesses including five of Africa’s largest banks and four of Africa’s largest retailers. The Omnisient platform is compliant with consumer privacy regulations globally, including GDPR, POPIA and California’s CCPA.
• Omnisient’s oversubscribed round also included follow-on investors One5, ENL and early shareholders, Investec and Nedbank.