About the North Korea investors, no offense but are you sure that there are people that has access to the internet living there? Base on the documentary that I've watched, people are restricted to access to the web there.
You don't have budget for the extraction? you can manually check all of those KYC and just hire someone to work on it. Monitoring those investors that you are restricting base on their country.
I guess OP can try to create a cooperation with civic app, i thought that is there a way to be engaged with civic company. People must try to download it and see how it works and it may become an alternative way for that.
I'm not aware of the use of this kind of app. But I have checked it's feature and it says.
The Civic App allows you to provide authenticated, reusable identity information to partner websites for account sign up, KYC and access, including technologies...
Maybe he can contact them or someone who has more knowledge about this.