Bethnal Green Ventures cuts founder onboarding time and KYB admin with Vouchsafe

Bethnal Green Ventures is Europe’s leading tech-for-good VC. Since 2025, they have used Vouchsafe to conduct KYB checks on founders joining the BGV investment portfolio.

Yumi Tsoy describes the problems they were having and what’s improved now Vouchsafe is in the mix:

What problem did you use Vouchsafe to solve?

We needed a smoother way to run checks on founders joining our portfolio.

Before Vouchsafe, getting these checks started was operationally heavy. We used to need a founder’s full legal name and phone number upfront to enter into our old system, and there was much more admin involved to get everything moving.

For a team working across multiple founders and investors at once, that overhead adds up fast!

It was important for us to make this process faster, easier to manage and more inclusive for founders coming from different backgrounds or based in different places.

What was hardest about your previous KYC process?

The operational load.

At times we were managing checks for around 30 founders in one go, and doing investor checks too. Before using dedicated tools, parts of this process were manual, including searches against sanctions and fraud databases.

That gets especially time-consuming when someone has a very common name, because you then have to cross-reference multiple records and work out whether any of them are actually the person in front of you.

There was also a practical inclusion issue. Some founders are abroad, some do not primarily communicate by phone, and some just do not fit neatly into the assumptions built into our older verification processes.

What difference has Vouchsafe made since?

Vouchsafe has made it much faster for us to issue checks and created a much smoother onboarding process for founders.

It has reduced the admin involved in even getting a check underway, and it has taken a lot of manual work out of the process. Instead of jumping between different databases and trying to piece things together ourselves, we can see the check results in one place and make our own assessment from there.

The speed has been really helpful, and so has the ability to move through the process with less friction.

What made Vouchsafe the right fit for you?

A big part of it was flexibility and responsiveness.

We want to be inclusive and support founders from all kinds of backgrounds, so having more options for how people can verify themselves really matters. Vouchsafe gave us a better way to do that, while also helping us carry out broader checks and reduce the chance of missing something important.

It has also helped from a risk point of view. The biggest problem for us is not someone finding the process slightly inconvenient. It is letting the wrong person through because we did not have a clear enough picture of who they were. Online checks have helped us prevent that.

Vouchsafe helps firms replace legacy document checks with easy, safe digital ID acceptance.

Are you in a similar situation to Bethnal Green Ventures? Get a free 14 day trial of all features or book a conversation with Jaye Hackett, CTO.