Business identity verification startup Duna has raised a €30 million Series A, a strong vote of confidence for a European fintech built by Stripe alumni. The round was led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund, with participation from existing investors and a roster of senior operators from both Stripe and Adyen — underscoring how central Know Your Business tooling has become to the modern payments and fintech stack.
A Focused Fix For Painful KYB Onboarding
Co-founded by former Stripe leaders Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber and operating out of Germany and the Netherlands, Duna builds software that helps fintechs and financial services firms onboard business customers with less friction and fewer false negatives. Early customers include Plaid, and the company says its platform reduces drop-off tied to corporate identity checks and fraud prevention gates — a persistent source of churn for B2B fintechs.
While Stripe is not a customer, the cap table reads like an operator’s roundtable. Angels include Stripe COO Michael Coogan alongside former Stripe executives David Singleton and Claire Hughes Johnson. From Stripe’s European rival Adyen, CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky also invested. Index Ventures, which led Duna’s earlier €10.7 million seed, re-upped, joined by Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman.
Why This Round Matters For KYB And Fintech Growth
CapitalG’s lead is notable: the fund has backed Stripe since co-leading its 2016 Series D, and its participation here signals belief that KYB is entering a scale phase. The “Stripe mafia” pipeline — alumni starting companies that attack deep infrastructure problems — is now a recognizable phenomenon in fintech, and Duna’s raise positions it as one of the best-funded European entrants focused on business identity.
The timing aligns with escalating regulatory pressure. The Financial Action Task Force and European directives have tightened expectations around corporate due diligence, beneficial ownership, and ongoing monitoring. According to LexisNexis Risk Solutions, financial crime compliance costs surpassed $200B globally in 2023, and banks routinely cite business onboarding as a cost center. In the Netherlands alone, the four largest banks employ about 14,000 people in compliance; roughly 50% of them focus on business clients — a telling proxy for the scale of the problem.
From Data Aggregation To Data Creation At Scale
Duna isn’t just stitching together data from registries and third-party sources; it is building and validating its own corpus. That shift matters. Aggregators struggle with incomplete filings, inconsistent formats across jurisdictions, and slow update cycles — all of which produce errors, delays, and manual reviews. By generating primary or semi-primary records, Duna aims to reduce ambiguity, push more decisions straight-through, and lower both unit economics and time to approve.
Competitors in the KYB space include Jumio and Veriff, among others. The emerging wedge is less about feature parity and more about data quality, coverage, and the ability to give compliance teams explainable decisions they can audit. For enterprise buyers, that translates into fewer tickets, faster SLAs, and measurable conversion gains — the kinds of metrics that justify a platform swap.
A Reusable Business Passport And Network Effects
Duna’s longer-term bet is to turn verified business profiles into reusable credentials — a kind of portable “business passport” that lets a company apply the same vetted information across multiple platforms, from spend management tools to banking. If successful, the model introduces powerful network effects: each verification not only onboards a customer but also enriches a network others can trust.
Because networks take time to compound, Duna is seeding adoption in “patches” where overlap already exists. Think groups of manufacturers sharing the same distributors, investment firms with overlapping LPs, or tightly connected ecosystems in smaller countries. In these clusters, reusing a verified file has immediate value, even before the network reaches broad-based critical mass.
What To Watch Next For Duna’s KYB Expansion
Execution now becomes a race on three fronts: expanding jurisdictional coverage, sustaining high-precision data at scale, and winning design partners who commit volume. If Duna can maintain low false-positive and false-negative rates while widening its footprint, it can credibly chase the prize many in fintech covet — a one-click-style business onboarding flow reminiscent of consumer checkout products like Stripe Link, but for B2B identity.
For buyers weighing options, diligence will hinge on evidence: demonstrable lift in conversion, materially lower cost per onboarding, and auditable decisions that satisfy internal and external regulators. With CapitalG’s backing and a bench of Stripe and Adyen operators at its side, Duna has the right signals. The next phase will show whether its data-first approach and network strategy can turn those signals into durable market share.
