Omnisient, a provider of consumer privacy-protecting data collaboration platform in emerging markets, has closed $3.5 million in expansion capital led by Buffet investments, KLT and the Shoprite Group.
The over-subscribed expansion round also included follow-on investors One5, ENL and early shareholders Investec and Nedbank.
Omnisient’s bank-grade cryptography protects consumer privacy and ensures compliance with global privacy regulations while enabling businesses to analyze and commercialize first-party datasets in a secure and neutral cloud environment.
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.
“This round of investment will be used to support our continued geographic expansion, as well as the ongoing development of our platform into the world’s leading source of consumer intelligence that fully complies with global consumer privacy regulations,” says Jon Jacobson, co-founder, and CEO of Omnisient.
“We are excited by local start-ups that are creating value for our customers and partner businesses, whilst having privacy at the core of their offering,” says Neil Schreuder, Chief of Strategy & Innovation at ShopriteX, the Group’s data and customer technology unit that has been working with Omnisient for the past year.
“As a data-rich organization, this investment will enable us to deepen our knowledge and understanding of our customers and their needs, so that we can continue to expand on the relevant services we offer them.”
In partnership with Omnisient, Shoprite will be able to use customer data to better understand and identify opportunities to create more value, such as improving financial inclusion for its unbanked customers by providing financial institutions with consumption data as alternative data for credit scoring. The World Bank estimates that up to 65% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are unbanked or lack access to formal credit.
“Financial inclusion has been a core use case driving the rapid market adoption of our platform in South Africa and our growth into other emerging markets in Africa, the Middle East and Asia,” continues Jacobson.
Omnisient has been focusing on emerging markets where the opportunity to grow financial inclusion is greatest.
Omnisient 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.
