Why We Invested: Cybervergent – Build Trust

Africa is digitising at speed. Its enterprises are moving money, processing data, and managing infrastructure at a scale that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. And with that growth comes a challenge: the compliance, risk, and governance burden that comes with operating in regulated industries across fragmented, hybrid digital environments.

Most of the world's leading cybersecurity and GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) platforms were built for markets in North America and Europe — designed to serve cloud-native organisations, priced in dollars, and calibrated to regulatory regimes that bear little resemblance to what a Tier 2 Nigerian bank, a Kenyan telco, or a West African fintech actually faces. The result is a structural gap: African enterprises are navigating increasingly complex compliance requirements — NDPR, Ghana's DPA, CBN frameworks, PCI DSS — with tools that are either too expensive, too generic, or simply not built for how they operate.

The GRC software market globally has already produced billion-dollar companies. Vanta and Drata collectively raised over $500M and are valued in the billions — because compliance automation became a must-have for enterprises operating in regulated environments with growing cyber threat surfaces. That same dynamic is now playing out across Africa, with a critical distinction: the market is structurally underserved, the regulatory wave is still building, and local founders have a genuine, durable advantage that global incumbents cannot easily replicate. 

The Nigeria cybersecurity market alone is projected to grow from $230M in 2025 to $382M by 2030. The broader GRC market across the Middle East and Africa is expected to more than double to $10.9B by 2030. 

This is not a niche opportunity.

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Why This Matters Now

Behind all of those market numbers is a more fundamental currency underpinning every enterprise in this space: trust.

Compliance, risk management, and data governance are ultimately the mechanics of demonstrating that your organisation can be trusted — by regulators, by partners, by customers, and by counterparties.You can see it in enterprise procurement, vendor onboarding, and increasingly in how fintechs are assessed by partners, counterparties, and regulators. The shift is from having policies on paper to being expected to show, continuously, how data, risk, and compliance are actually being managed.

This is especially true in Africa. Across many of the continent’s most important digital sectors - particularly fintech and financial services - trust is not something you get to assume. It is something you have to earn and retain, repeatedly.

And that bar is getting higher.

From Nigeria to Kenya to South Africa, the rules are becoming more formal, more enforceable, and harder to manage manually. Cyber incidents have cost African businesses and governments more than $3 billion since 2019. Enterprise customers are more sophisticated. Fraud and scam risk remain real. Cross-border expansion adds complexity. The result is that trust increasingly behaves like operating infrastructure. If you cannot demonstrate it clearly, you move slower. If you can, you grow faster.

The companies that will scale best over the next decade will not just be the ones with the right controls on paper. They will be the ones that can operationalize trust continuously - across compliance, risk, and third-party relationships - in a way that supports growth rather than slowing it down.

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Meet Cybervergent 

Cybervergent is an Africa-first cybersecurity and digital trust platform automating compliance, risk, and data governance for enterprise clients across industries - notably financial services, fintech, and the public sector. 

Cybervergent has built a B2B SaaS, single source of truth platform that simplifies and automates cybersecurity and privacy governance, risk, and compliance across cloud platforms and on-premise systems for global enterprises. This SaaS platform replaces manual, services-led governance processes with an AI-driven, modular suite enabling continuous visibility, risk management, and regulatory alignment across hybrid cloud and on-premises systems.

The platform maps and supports more than 4,500 regulatory and security controls, cross-referenced across over 100 regulatory frameworks across the Pan-EMEA region - from local frameworks like Nigeria’s NDPR to international standards like ISO 27001, GDPR, and PCI-DSS. For organizations operating across multiple African jurisdictions, this breadth matters enormously.

“We built Cybervergent to make digital trust a continuous reality for organizations across Africa - from high-growth startups to established industry leaders.” - Adetokunbo Omotosho, Co-Founder & CEO

What makes this especially compelling is that the company is not simply importing a category built elsewhere. It is building from the realities of African enterprises outward.

Many African enterprises still operate in complex, hybrid environments - part cloud, part on-premise - with regulatory expectations that vary by market and are becoming more enforceable. That is exactly where generic global tools tend to fall short. 

Cybervergent was built with those realities in mind. And it shows in the customer base. The company is already trusted by institutions like GTCO, Moniepoint, OPay, Flutterwave, Interswitch, Paystack, IHS, and a range of public sector and regulated institutions.

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The Impact So Far

The numbers tell a story of quiet, compounding momentum. 

Cybervergent was incubated inside a profitable consulting business, Infoprive, which reached over ₦1.5B (~$1M USD) in revenue before the formal product spinout. That origin matters. It means the team did not guess their way into this market - they spent over a decade embedded in it, solving real compliance and governance problems for real enterprises before writing a single line of SaaS code.

Since rebranding to Cybervergent in 2023 and launching the platform, the growth has been substantial:

• 150+ enterprise clients across West, East, and Southern Africa - spanning Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Cameroon - in banking, insurance, telecoms, fintech, and the public sector.
• 4,500+ regulatory and security controls mapped across 100+ frameworks in the Pan-EMEA region.
• 70%+ reduction in time and effort for compliance, risk, and audit workflows for client organizations.
• Named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2025 - a designation previously awarded to early-stage versions of Google and Airbnb.
• $3M seed round closed in early 2026, co-led by Ventures Platform Pan-African Fund II and Atlantica Ventures

These numbers are more than statistics. They represent a genuine shift in how African enterprises manage digital trust - from periodic, manual, spreadsheet-driven audits to a continuous, automated posture. For every enterprise that has adopted Cybervergent, the window of undetected risk has narrowed dramatically.

Yet this is just the beginning. What sets Cybervergent apart is that the same platform that serves a mid-sized Nigerian fintech today can scale to serve a pan-African bank tomorrow. The product architecture was built for this. The team was built for this.

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The Why - Our Investment Decision 

What stood out early for us was the depth of domain expertise, the founding team’s understanding of the problem they were trying to solve, and the trust they had already built with reputable institutions operating in complex environments.

Adetokunbo Omotosho (Co-Founder & CEO) is a former McKinsey executive with deep expertise in compliance, risk management, and data governance. His time at Interswitch gave him firsthand visibility into the gaps in enterprise security and compliance infrastructure across African financial services — gaps that Infoprive was built to address, and that Cybervergent is now automating at scale.

Ayomide Daniels (Co-Founder, Chief Scientist & Head of Technology) leads the platform's architecture, automation, and AI-native modules. He brings multi-venture experience across applied AI, infrastructure design, and developer tooling — and has been central to building a system that can handle the complexity of hybrid deployments across African enterprise environments.

Gbolade Awelewa (Chief Solutions Officer) brings extensive fintech and cybersecurity leadership experience from UBA and Interswitch, with a track record of launching and scaling security-focused products in regulated African markets.

Together, this team has done something that is genuinely difficult: taken deep services expertise and encoded it into scalable software without losing the contextual nuance that made the services valuable in the first place.

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The Opportunity

As one of the few indigenous, product-led digital trust platforms in the market - with 13+  years of embedded market knowledge through its predecessor - Cybervergent has both brand trust and deep familiarity with regional regulatory regimes. Its AI-enhanced, hybrid-ready architecture positions it well to meet the needs of mid-to-large African enterprises in a way that global incumbents simply cannot replicate.

What began as deep services insight is now becoming product leverage - moving trust work from manual and episodic to something continuous and scalable. That shift is still early. The category is still being defined, and that is exactly where we want to be.

Cybervergent has the product, the customer relationships, the regulatory expertise, and the founding team to be the company that defines this category across the continent. 

We are proud to be part of that journey from its earliest institutional stage.

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Ventures Platform Pan-African Fund II (VP PAF II) co-led Cybervergent's $3M seed round alongside Atlantica Ventures. If you are building infrastructure for African enterprise, we want to hear from you. Apply here.

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