Duna Raises €30M Series A to Build the Internet’s Missing Business Identity Layer

What is Duna?

Duna is an AI-native business identity platform founded in 2023 by former Stripe executives Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. Headquartered across Germany and the Netherlands, the company provides a “digital passport” for businesses that enables organisations to verify, share, and reuse corporate identity information securely. Unlike traditional Know Your Business (KYB) providers that rely on static data aggregation, Duna generates its own verification data through AI-powered analysis, creating a network effect where verified identities can be reused across multiple platforms.

The company has raised €30 million in Series A funding led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, with participation from existing backers Index Ventures, Puzzle Ventures, and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman. This brings Duna’s total funding to approximately €40.7 million and establishes it as the best-funded European member of the “Stripe mafia,” the network of startups founded by alumni of the payments giant.

The Problem: Business Onboarding as a Hidden Tax

Every new B2B relationship begins with the same friction: the exchange of documents, manual verification checks, and compliance procedures that can take days or weeks. For financial institutions, this “business identity” problem consumes 10-20% of total operational costs, according to Duna’s research. The expensive, manual legacy systems lead to billions lost in fraud, friction, and regulatory fines, plus lost revenue from refusals of legitimate customers.

The traditional approach relies on aggregating existing data sources, which are often incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent across jurisdictions. Companies like Jumio and Veriff have built substantial businesses on document verification, but they face a fundamental limitation: they are only as good as their data sources.

Duna’s founding insight, earned through years at Stripe, is that business identity requires fine-grained controls that change on a company-by-company basis. A multinational bank, a German spend management platform, and a Dutch e-commerce marketplace each have different risk tolerances, regulatory requirements, and verification workflows. This complexity creates an opportunity for a dedicated platform that can generate primary verification data rather than simply aggregating secondary sources.

The Solution: AI-Native Verification with Network Effects

Duna’s platform uses artificial intelligence to verify business identity documents, analyse corporate structures, and assess risk in real time. The AI-native approach allows for continuous learning and adaptation to new fraud patterns, regulatory requirements, and document types. But the technical architecture is only half the story.

The company’s strategic vision is to evolve from a verification tool into a network. Once a business has been verified by Duna, that identity becomes portable. A company onboarded through Moss, the German spend management platform, could reuse its verified identity to open an account with Plaid or secure financing from SVEA Bank. This “one-click onboarding” promise addresses the fundamental friction in B2B commerce: the repeated verification burden that slows transactions and increases abandonment rates.

Alex Nichols, General Partner at CapitalG who led the investment, frames this as a network effects opportunity: “It’s the rare chance to rebuild something as foundational as a Visa and create an amazing business in the process.”

The platform is already delivering measurable results. Customers including Plaid, Fiserv subsidiary CCV, Moss, Bol, and SVEA Bank report onboarding that is more than ten times faster and significant productivity gains compared to manual processes.

The Stripe Mafia: Founder-Market Fit and Talent Density

Duco van Lanschot previously served as Head of Benelux and DACH at Stripe, building the payments company’s presence in Northern Europe. David Schreiber ran Stripe’s largest global business unit, encompassing its core card payments platform. Their experience gives them unusual insight into the business identity problem: at Stripe, they witnessed firsthand how KYB friction slowed merchant onboarding and increased churn.

This “earned insight” is a key criterion for CapitalG, which has backed Stripe since co-leading its Series D in 2016. Nichols notes that van Lanschot and Schreiber possess “not only deep founder-market fit but also the leadership skills to build a high-ownership, talent-dense culture to achieve such an ambitious vision.”

The “Stripe mafia” phenomenon has become a significant force in technology. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei and OpenAI president Gregory Brockman are both Stripe alumni. Duna joins a cohort of startups founded by former Stripe employees that have attracted substantial venture capital, reflecting both the quality of talent the company develops and the breadth of problems its employees encountered at scale.

Duna’s cap table reflects this network. Angel investors include former Stripe executives David Singleton (CTO), Claire Hughes Johnson (COO), and Michael Cocoman (Global Chief Compliance Officer). Even Stripe rival Adyen is represented, with CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky participating as angels. Their involvement validates van Lanschot’s assessment that payment processors will not compete directly with Duna: the problem requires such specialised, configurable solutions that it makes sense as a standalone platform rather than a product line within a larger company.

Competitive Landscape: KYB, KYC, and the Identity Verification Market

Duna operates in the Know Your Business (KYB) segment of the broader identity verification market, which is projected to grow from $13.7 billion in 2024 to $63 billion by 2033, according to Straits Research. This growth is driven by regulatory requirements (KYC, AML, GDPR), increasing fraud sophistication, and the shift to digital onboarding.

Direct competitors include:

Jumio: A leading identity verification provider that acquired KYB specialist 4Stop in 2023. Jumio offers comprehensive document verification and biometric authentication but focuses primarily on consumer identity rather than business-specific workflows.

Veriff: An Estonian identity verification company that raised $100 million in 2022. Veriff emphasises speed and conversion optimisation for consumer-facing applications, with business verification as a secondary offering.

Middesk: A US-based business identity platform that provides automated KYB checks. Middesk focuses on the American market and integrates with existing data sources rather than generating primary verification data.

Onfido: Recently acquired by Entrust for $400 million, Onfido specialises in document and biometric verification. Its strength is in consumer onboarding for financial services, with business applications as an extension.

Duna differentiates through its AI-native document generation (rather than aggregation), its focus on reusable identity networks, and its European base with global ambitions. The €30 million Series A provides substantial capital to compete against well-funded American rivals.

The CapitalG Investment: Strategic Validation

CapitalG’s investment is particularly significant given its history with Stripe. The firm has backed Stripe since 2016 and understands the payments and financial infrastructure landscape deeply. Its portfolio includes fintech leaders such as Robinhood, Monzo, and CrowdStrike, alongside enterprise software companies like Databricks and UiPath.

For CapitalG, Duna represents an opportunity to invest in the “picks and shovels” of the digital economy. As more business moves online, the need for trusted, reusable identity infrastructure becomes critical. Nichols’ comparison to Visa is apt: just as Visa created a network for payment trust, Duna aims to create a network for business identity trust.

The investment also reflects CapitalG’s increased activity in 2025, when it made 18 new investments according to Tracxn data. The firm is deploying capital aggressively in growth-stage companies transitioning from startup to scale-up, exactly where Duna sits with its Series A.

Go-to-Market Strategy: Patches of Networks

Duna’s path to network effects relies on identifying “patches of networks,” clusters of companies that already have business relationships with each other. These include manufacturing companies with shared customers, investment firms with overlapping limited partners, or companies within the same small country. In these tight-knit groups, the ability to reuse verification creates immediate value even before Duna achieves full global network effects.

This strategy is particularly suited to the European market, where cross-border business is common but regulatory fragmentation creates verification friction. A German company seeking to do business in the Netherlands faces different KYB requirements than one expanding to France. Duna’s platform normalises these differences, providing a single verification standard that works across jurisdictions.

The company currently operates primarily in Germany and the Netherlands, with the Series A funding supporting expansion across Europe and into the United States. The US market is particularly attractive given its size and the complexity of its state-by-state regulatory environment for business registration.

AI, Compliance, and the Future of Business Trust

The funding will specifically support Duna’s expansion of “compliant, auditable AI” capabilities. This is critical for maintaining the regulatory standards required by banks and large enterprises. Financial institutions face strict requirements for explainability in automated decisions, particularly in credit and onboarding contexts.

Duna’s AI approach must balance automation with transparency. The platform uses machine learning to extract and verify information from business documents, but it must also provide audit trails that satisfy regulators. This is a non-trivial engineering challenge: AI systems that are highly accurate are often “black boxes,” while explainable systems may sacrifice performance.

The company’s positioning as “AI-native” rather than “AI-enhanced” suggests it has built its architecture around this challenge from the beginning, rather than retrofitting AI onto legacy systems. This technical foundation will be tested as it scales to handle larger, more complex corporate structures and cross-border verification scenarios.

Conclusion: From Cost Center to Revenue Driver

Duna’s founders articulate a compelling vision: turning compliance from a cost center into a revenue driver. By reducing the friction of business onboarding, companies can expand their customer base, enter new markets faster, and reduce abandonment rates. The verified identity network creates value for all participants: businesses save time, platforms reduce fraud, and the broader digital economy operates more efficiently.

The €30 million Series A provides the capital to pursue this vision at scale. With backing from CapitalG, Index Ventures, and a who’s who of fintech executives, Duna has the resources and network to establish itself as the standard for business identity verification.

Whether it can achieve the network effects necessary to become the “Visa of business identity” remains to be seen. The identity verification market is fragmented, with dozens of providers competing across different geographies and use cases. But Duna’s combination of experienced founders, AI-native technology, and strategic positioning at the intersection of fintech and enterprise software makes it a company to watch closely.

For the European tech ecosystem, Duna represents another validation that deep fintech infrastructure can be built from the continent, not just imported from Silicon Valley. The “Stripe mafia” may have started in San Francisco, but its European chapter is writing its own story.

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