Verified counterparty data for Africa — who is real, who is licensed, who is insured, who delivers. Built by verification, kept fresh by design, and warranted to the humans and AI agents who act on it.
AI can now manufacture a convincing business in an afternoon. Nothing in the stack tells you which ones are real.
Commerce is being rewired around AI agents that search, decide and — increasingly — transact. The payment rails for that world are being standardised right now. They verify the buyer: the agent’s identity, the human’s mandate, the credential.
None of them verify the counterparty. Whether the business on the other end is registered, licensed, insured, solvent — whether it will deliver — is a question the protocols leave open. And the cost of faking all of it is collapsing toward zero.
Every commerce era builds this layer eventually. Card payments work because merchant acquirers vetted every merchant first. The agent economy hasn’t built its version yet — especially not for Africa. That is the layer Attest exists to build.
Company registration, directors and their linkages, credit standing, identity and bank-account verification — drawn from authoritative registers. The foundation, not the product.
Tax status confirmed with SARS. B-BBEE with the certifying agency. Licences against statutory registers. Insurance confirmed with the insurer — and monitored continuously, so an expiry never goes unseen.
Verified operating profiles, key people, premises, references — and, over time, a record of faithfulness: responsiveness, delivery, discipline. Consent-based, human-verified, impossible to scrape.
A scraper can copy our facts. It cannot copy our having verified them.
Verification has always been a privilege of the already-included. Rise inverts that: it extends attestation to black-owned SMEs beyond today’s supply chains — funded through enterprise and supplier development, owned by the businesses themselves.
Corporate enterprise-development spend funds the attestation of SMEs outside current supplier perimeters — with measurable, audit-ready outcomes: attested, tender-ready, bankable.
An attested profile belongs to the business, not to us and not to any sponsor. Portable to any buyer, any bank, any platform. A record of faithfulness, where bureaus have only ever recorded failure.
A verified history — delivery, discipline, continuity — is exactly what lenders lack when they decline a thin-file business. Attestation becomes the credit story for the collateral-less.
Rise is not a programme bolted onto the business — it is the same graph, extended to where it matters most. If you run an ESD programme, or you fund SME growth, we would like to talk.
“The merchant acquirers of the agent economy.”
Agent payments are being standardised in public — identity, mandate, checkout, settlement. When AI agents transact with African businesses at scale, the missing answer will be trust: is this counterparty real, and up to how much? Attest is built API-first so that answer is ready to be consumed — by procurement systems today, by agents tomorrow.
If you lead procurement, compliance or supplier development at a large corporate — or you fund SME growth in Africa — we’d value a conversation before launch.
hello@attest.africa · Cape Town, South Africa