Company profile

Probe Compliance is a RegTech company providing technology-driven anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crime compliance solutions to regulated businesses across Africa. Its proprietary platform enables organisations to strengthen their compliance frameworks through automated customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, sanctions screening, adverse media screening, and crime database checks. By combining global sanctions data with real-time adverse media intelligence, Probe helps organisations mitigate financial crime risks, and meet evolving regulatory requirements efficiently and cost-effectively.

Why we invested

The tools the world uses to police financial crime were not built with Africa in mind, and it shows the moment you try to use them there. Run a customer from Lagos, Accra or Nairobi through a screening system designed around Western names and Western data, and you get one of two failures: a result so thin it tells you nothing, or a screen so cluttered with false matches that a real risk could hide in the noise. African naming conventions, where one person may appear under several spellings and transliterations, corporate structures that don't resemble their Western equivalents, and patchier underlying data simply do not map onto infrastructure built for somewhere else. The result is that the institutions most in need of clean compliance are served worst by it. This is exactly the gap Probe is built to close.

What enticed us is that the people building it have lived the problem from the side of the institutions that suffer it. Akinola spent years inside global banking using the market's compliance tools first-hand and watching them stumble, again and again, over African individuals and businesses they were never designed to read. A team that has felt that failure in their own hands and understood it tends to build a better solution than a team that has only read about the failure.

The timing of this was also ideal for us. Across Africa and the wider emerging markets, AML rules are tightening, with regulators and bodies like the Financial Action Task Force pushing financial institutions towards stricter, increasingly automated screening. Some regulators are now moving to mandate real-time monitoring outright. As those requirements harden into law, banks and fintechs across the region will need exactly what Probe offers. Probe is selling something its customers increasingly cannot choose not to buy.

We backed Probe because compliance infrastructure is not a nice-to-have for African finance; it is the precondition for the sector to grow, connect to global capital, and be trusted with it. A market-native product built by people who know the gap from the inside is how that infrastructure gets built, and how Probe becomes the standard the region screens against.