Stripe-Backed Duna Secures €30M to Fix Business ID Checks

Business identity verification startup Duna, founded by Stripe alumni Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber, has secured a €30 million Series A funding round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG to scale its European-based digital B2B identity network and eliminate corporate onboarding friction.

The Rise of the ‘Stripe Mafia’ in Europe

While AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI operate as fierce rivals, their respective presidents, Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman, share a common pedigree as Stripe alumni. The fintech giant has rapidly transformed into one of the tech industry’s most productive “founder factories,” with former employees launching dozens of high-growth startups. Duna is the latest breakout from this ecosystem, securing €30 million in Series A funding to become the most well-funded European member of the legendary “Stripe mafia.” The investment round was led by Alphabet’s growth equity fund, CapitalG, which has also been a key backer of Stripe since co-leading its Series D round in 2016.

Solving the Costly Friction of B2B Onboarding

Operating out of Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was established by former Stripe employees Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. Serving high-profile fintech clients like Plaid, the platform enables financial technology firms to onboard corporate clients with greater efficiency. This directly addresses and mitigates the high customer churn rates typically caused by slow corporate identity verification and complex fraud prevention protocols.

Backed by Industry Giants from Stripe and Adyen

Although Stripe is not currently a Duna customer, its top executives immediately recognized the market opportunity the startup is targeting, which is reflected in Duna’s impressive cap table. The company’s angel investors include former Stripe CTO David Singleton, former COO Claire Hughes Johnson, and former Global Chief Compliance Officer Michael Cocoman. Prominent leaders from rival fintech powerhouse Adyen have also backed the venture, including Chief Regulatory and Compliance Officer Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky.

These high-profile endorsements validate van Lanschot’s strategic belief that major payment companies will not build competing internal solutions. He noted that business onboarding requires highly customized, granular controls that vary significantly from client to client. Because of this complexity, giant processors like Stripe or Adyen are unlikely to spin out their internal onboarding tools as separate, highly configurable enterprise products for external customers.

Building a Global Trust Infrastructure

Duna is targeting the massive, underserved market of mid-sized and enterprise clients that lack the internal resources to build sophisticated business onboarding systems. However, the startup’s ultimate objective is far broader: establishing a global network that allows verified corporate identities to be seamlessly reused across different platforms.

The long-term goal is to construct a global trust infrastructure that functions as a digital passport for businesses. Under this model, a company could reuse its verified onboarding file from a spend management platform like Moss to instantly onboard with Plaid, or to open a new corporate bank account without repeating the verification process.

This network-driven vision attracted Alex Nichols, the partner at CapitalG who led the Series A investment. Nichols explained that he targets investments featuring clear network effects or structural scale advantages. He highlighted Duna as a prime example of founders leveraging deep, earned insights to solve a highly specialized problem.

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Redefining Know Your Business (KYB) Standards

The Know Your Business (KYB) sector is highly competitive, with established players like Jumio and Veriff occupying the space. However, CapitalG’s Nichols points out that Duna distinguishes itself by generating its own proprietary data rather than simply aggregating existing, often unreliable databases. He compared the opportunity to rebuilding a foundational financial utility on the scale of Visa.

Duna has already demonstrated a strong business case by helping its clients onboard corporate users faster and at a lower cost. This early success prompted existing backers to double down on the Series A, including Index Ventures, which previously led Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025. Other participating investors include Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman. Achieving the grander vision of a global identity network, however, requires massive scale, prompting Duna to seek strategic shortcuts.

Accelerating Scale Through Micro-Networks and AI

To build momentum, van Lanschot and his team are targeting “patches of networks”—small, highly concentrated clusters of companies that already share operational overlap. These clusters include manufacturing hubs with shared clients, investment firms dealing with the same limited partners (LPs), or businesses operating within smaller national economies. In these environments, the utility of reusable identity verification is realized almost immediately, long before global network effects are fully established.

While these initial target markets may seem small, the underlying financial opportunity is massive. In the Netherlands alone, the country’s four largest banks employ roughly 13,000 compliance professionals, with half of them focused exclusively on business verification. While Duna’s platform will not completely replace these compliance teams immediately, its AI-driven automation delivers immediate cost savings and revenue generation while the broader network expands.

If Duna successfully establishes the underlying rails for a universal business identity network, the next step is enabling one-click business onboarding. This frictionless experience would mirror Amazon’s one-click checkout for consumer retail, or Stripe Link for B2B transactions, keeping Duna’s operational philosophy closely aligned with its Stripe roots.