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Africa's trust infrastructure

Africa's trust layer for digital payments and AI.

Verify before you send. Build a reputation that travels with you, across every platform and border.

$1.1 Trillion
African mobile commerce market
$3 to $4 Billion
Lost to digital payment fraud annually
65%
Africa's share of global mobile money volume
What we do

Two ways we build trust

Community Verified

Cheka by Vherifai

Community-powered trust verification for African digital payments. Before you send money, check. Build a verified reputation that travels across every platform and border.

Independent Assessment

AI Credibility House

Independent validation, advisory, and credentialing for AI products and teams across emerging markets. Built for founders, funders, and the ecosystem.

Transacting digitally in Africa?

Building an AI product?

Verify before you send

Cheka by Vherifai

Your transaction trust companion for African digital payments

Cheka means to check. Built on a whitelist model. Verified merchants earn their place through evidence, community confirmation, and ongoing accountability. The absence of a listing is not an accusation. It is simply the beginning of a trust-building journey.

Cheka does not point fingers. It builds trust.

How it works

Three moments where trust matters

Before You Send

Check any mobile money number, paybill, or merchant identifier before you send money. Get an instant trust signal: verified or not yet verified.

After You Transact

Confirm how it went. Your outcome adds to the community intelligence that protects the next person. Every confirmation makes the platform stronger.

For Merchants

Claim your profile. Submit verification. Build a transaction history. A verified Cheka profile travels across platforms and borders, earning buyer confidence everywhere you trade.

Ready to check a merchant?

Cheka is available on WhatsApp. Message us now to verify any mobile money number, paybill, or merchant identifier instantly.

Message Cheka on WhatsApp +263 788 922 330

Are you a merchant? Build your verified reputation.

Verified merchants on Cheka earn buyer confidence, build a transaction history, and unlock access to the financial services that a verifiable reputation makes possible.

Where we operate

Cheka markets

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Zimbabwe
EcoCash
Live
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Kenya
M-Pesa
Coming Soon
Independent, staged validation

AI Validation

Your reliable big brother in AI development. Helping you build right from the start.

What is AI Validation

Not an audit. A staged check-in, at every milestone.

Vherifai AI Validation checks your product at each stage of your build journey, the way a standards body certifies at each stage of production, not just at the end.

We assess your technical foundation, your team's capacity, your product's claims, and your deployment readiness. You walk away with a structured report you can put in front of investors and funders with confidence.

Foundation to growth
Team capacity, not just code
Investor-ready report
app.vherifai.com/validation-report
Zawadi AI
Stage 2. Build Validation.
In Progress
75
Foundation
Build
Deployment
Beta
Security review passed
2 items need attention
What teams say

Teams we have worked with

Zawadi AI
Kenya. Pre-Seed. Stage 2 Build Validation.

"We went into our investor meeting with a Vherifai report in hand. The investor told us it was the first time they had seen an African AI startup come prepared with independent technical validation. We closed the round."

Amara Osei, Co-Founder, Zawadi AI
NovaMind Labs
Nigeria. Seed. Stage 3 Deployment Validation.

"Vherifai caught three security vulnerabilities in our deployment that we had completely missed. Finding them before our public launch saved us from a serious reputational incident. Worth every cent."

Tobias Mensah, CTO, NovaMind Labs
Rafiki Analytics
Rwanda. Accelerator Cohort. Stage 1 to 2 Validation.

"Our accelerator brought in Vherifai to assess all ten companies in our cohort. The reports were detailed, fair, and genuinely useful. Two of our portfolio companies restructured their technical approach. That is exactly what early-stage support should look like."

Priya Nair, Programme Director, Rafiki Analytics
What you receive

Built for founders and funders

Investor-Ready Reports

A Vherifai Assessment Report gives investors and grant funders independent technical confidence in your product. No more taking your word for it.

Stage-by-Stage Guidance

We validate at every milestone: foundation, build, deployment, beta, and growth. Each report builds on the last. You grow with us.

Team Capacity Recognition

We assess not just what you built but who built it and what they can do. Degrees matter less than demonstrated capability.

Neutral on Wrappers vs. Proprietary

We do not penalise you for using wrappers at POC stage. We contextualise your technical choices within your stage and give you a clear roadmap.

Our process

The five validation stages

1. Foundation

Infrastructure, tech stack, third-party dependencies

2. Build

Codebase, model architecture, data pipelines

3. Deployment

Security, scraping protection, access controls, compliance

4. Beta

Product readiness, edge cases, UX, failure modes

5. Growth

Scale performance, model drift, responsible AI indicators

Pricing

Fair pricing at every stage

Bootstrapped / Pre-Seed
First validation $100
Free return validation within 6 months. $150 for 4 validations across 12 months.
Seed
$300 single validation
$800 annual package covering multiple checkpoints across the year.
Series A
$750 single validation
$2,000 annual programme with milestone reporting and advisory access.
Accelerator / Grant Cohort
$800 to $4,000
Per cohort, depending on stage mix and cohort size.
The first 15 validations are complimentary. Apply now to be considered.

Ready to validate your AI product?

The first 15 validations are complimentary. Apply now.

Book directly

Advisory and Consulting

Book directly. No chasing. No waiting.

Book now

Pick a time that works for you

V
Vherifai Advisory
1:1 advisory and consulting session

Tell us what you need

We match you to the right expert. Fill this in, then pick a time on the right.

  • 60 minutes. East Africa Time (EAT)
  • From $100 per session
July 2026
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Pick a date to see available times.
Our network

Experts across every AI discipline

ML Engineering NLP MLOps Computer Vision AI Ethics African Languages AI Data Science Data Strategy and Governance Fundraising and Investor Readiness Advisory Board Building

Not sure who you need? Select "Not sure. Match me to the right person" in the booking form above.

How it works

Three steps to your session

1

Browse topics

Choose the advisory topic that fits what you need.

2

Pick a time

Choose a slot that works for you in a couple of clicks.

3

Confirm and prepare

Receive payment instructions by email and confirm your session.

Advisory topics

What we can talk through

01

Building your AI tech stack

What to choose, what to avoid, what to defer until you have product-market fit.

02

Evaluating AI tools and vendors

How to assess technical claims and avoid hype in a noisy market.

03

AI product strategy

For early-stage startups figuring out where AI should and should not be in their product.

04

Responsible AI in practice

What ethical AI actually means operationally, not just in policy documents.

05

Data strategy and governance

Building data infrastructure that supports AI development and survives regulatory scrutiny.

06

Fundraising for AI startups

What investors and grant funders are really looking for technically and how to present it.

07

Building your advisory board

What to look for, red flags, how to structure equity, and how to run the relationship so it stays valuable.

08

Understanding African AI funding

Who is funding what, where the gaps are, and how to position your product for the right funders.

Pricing

Simple, transparent rates

Standard session (1 hour)
$100
Advisory board building session (2 hours)
$200
Monthly retainer (4 hours per month)
from $300 / month

Our advisors are vetted practitioners. Each session is matched to the right expert for your topic.

Are you an expert?

Join the Vherifai Advisor and Reviewer Network

We are building a bench of vetted practitioners across ML engineering, NLP, MLOps, computer vision, AI ethics, African languages AI, and data science. If you have deep expertise and want to contribute to Africa's AI credibility infrastructure, we want to hear from you.

Insights

Research, intelligence, thinking

From the frontlines of African AI and digital payments.

Research and reports

Publications and briefings

Cheka Series

Cheka Fraud Intelligence Brief: Zimbabwe Q3 2026

Three months of community-verified reports across EcoCash. Patterns, hotspots, and merchant-side recommendations.

Coming Q4 2026
Ecosystem

The State of AI in African Startups: 2026

A landscape report on how African AI companies are building, funding, and shipping. Based on primary interviews with 60+ founders.

Coming 2027
Vherifai Hub

African Digital Payments Trust Index

A quarterly benchmark of trust signals across mobile money markets. The first data product from Vherifai Hub.

Coming 2027
Thought leadership

Latest from the team

Why Africa needs a trust layer, not a fraud database

The framing that shapes everything Vherifai builds, and the story of how we got here.

Responsible AI in African markets: a working definition

Ethics documents are not enough. What responsible AI actually requires when you are building for real users.

What we learned building the first Cheka database

Three months of paybill collection, community verification, and the lessons that shape our data operations.

Speaking and events

Vherifai in the world

Panels, conferences, roundtables, and ecosystem contributions across Africa and beyond.

15 Sep
Upcoming

Africa Fintech Summit 2026

Panel: Building trust rails for African mobile money.

Nairobi, Kenya
02 Oct
Upcoming

Stanford GSE AI in Emerging Markets Symposium

Keynote: The case for verifiable reputation as public infrastructure.

Stanford, USA
20 Jun
Past

Zimbabwe Digital Trust Roundtable

Convening EcoCash merchants, regulators, and community reporters.

Harare, Zimbabwe
Fraud intelligence

What we are seeing across African mobile money

42%
of reported fraud involves a lookalike merchant name
3.4x
more reports on paybills active less than 30 days
67%
of victims reported feeling too embarrassed to report elsewhere
$180
median reported loss per incident across the network

These figures are illustrative and based on early community-reported data from our Zimbabwe pilot. Full methodology will be published with the first Cheka Fraud Intelligence Brief.

Contact

Get in touch

Pick the enquiry type that fits, and we will route you to the right person.

Direct contact

Email: info@vherifai.com

Locations

Nairobi, Kenya

Johannesburg, South Africa

Social

LinkedIn

Check a merchant on WhatsApp