Duna Raises €30M to Build the Business Identity Layer for Global Fintech

The €30 million Series A for Duna marks a watershed moment in the Know Your Business (KYB) sector. Led by CapitalG—Alphabet’s growth fund—the round validates a bold thesis: the process of verifying and onboarding business customers across financial platforms is broken, and fixing it at scale could unlock massive value for fintech companies, banks, and enterprises worldwide.

What makes this funding round particularly noteworthy isn’t just the size or the investor pedigree. It’s the quiet consensus it reveals among some of the most influential figures in fintech: Duna has identified a genuine infrastructure gap that incumbents like Stripe and Adyen aren’t rushing to fill themselves.

Why Stripe Alumni Are Betting Big on Business Verification

Duna’s journey reflects a broader pattern in fintech: some of the most successful ventures aren’t founded by outsiders, but by former employees of category-defining companies. Anthropic and OpenAI have set the template in AI; in payments and fintech infrastructure, Stripe plays an analogous role. Both Daniela Amodei (Anthropic) and Gregory Brockman (OpenAI) came from Stripe before launching their ventures. Now Duna, founded by Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber—both former Stripe engineers—has become the most heavily capitalized European startup to emerge from what some call the “Stripe mafia.”

The €30M Series A, combined with the €10.7M seed round led by Index Ventures in May 2025, positions Duna as a serious player in business identity verification. But what’s equally telling is who’s backing it beyond the institutional investors: Michael Coogan (former Stripe COO), David Singleton (ex-CTO), and Claire Hughes Johnson (previous COO) are all backing Duna. Even executives from Stripe’s rival Adyen—including Chief Revenue and Compliance Officer Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky—have committed capital to the round.

This cross-pollination suggests something deeper than typical startup investment. It signals that Duna is solving a problem that the entire fintech infrastructure layer acknowledges but hasn’t prioritized addressing internally.

The Network Effect Strategy: Making KYB Reusable Across Platforms

At its core, Duna operates in the Know Your Business (KYB) space, competing with established players like Jumio and Veriff. But Van Lanschot’s vision for Duna goes beyond incremental improvement. His ambition is to create a reusable digital identity layer for businesses—a kind of passport system where compliance and identity verification data gathered during onboarding with one platform (say, Moss) could be validated and reused with another (Plaid, or even a traditional bank).

From a user experience perspective, this could transform B2B onboarding from a multi-week process to something approaching a single click—similar to how Stripe Link simplified payments or Amazon’s one-click checkout revolutionized e-commerce. But building this requires more than good engineering. It requires a network.

This is why Alex Nichols, the CapitalG partner who led the Series A, found the investment compelling. “What Duna is doing,” Nichols has noted in discussions around the round, “is rare: they’re rebuilding a foundational system from scratch, similar to how Visa built the credit card network.” He also appreciates that Duna generates its own identity data rather than relying on aggregated third-party sources, which are often incomplete or stale—a critical advantage in a regulated space like KYB.

Duna’s Competitive Moat in a Crowded Market

The KYB verification landscape includes established competitors, but Duna’s approach differs in a meaningful way. While Jumio and Veriff rely heavily on data aggregation and pattern matching, Duna invests in generating original verification data. In a compliance-driven market where accuracy directly impacts a client’s regulatory risk, this commitment to data quality becomes a defensible moat.

Why haven’t Stripe or Adyen simply built this themselves? Van Lanschot’s reasoning is straightforward: the customization required for business onboarding is so specific to each client’s needs—their KYC requirements, regulatory jurisdiction, internal workflow—that offering it as a standalone product would be economically irrational. For a platform like Stripe, maintaining the core payments product requires laser focus. A KYB layer, even if successful, would fragment that attention.

This is why the investor roster includes competitors. There’s no direct threat; instead, there’s alignment. Both Stripe and Adyen benefit from a thriving ecosystem where onboarding friction decreases for their own customers.

From Compliance Cost Center to Revenue Driver

Most financial institutions view compliance as a cost center—a necessary burden imposed by regulators. But there’s an untold story in the numbers. In the Netherlands alone, the country’s four largest banks employ 14,000 people in compliance roles, with roughly 7,000 dedicated to business client onboarding and monitoring. This represents billions in annual spending across Europe and globally.

AI-driven automation, applied strategically to the onboarding workflow, can meaningfully reduce this cost structure. And while Duna isn’t positioned to replace human compliance officers overnight, the current round will fund the engineering and data infrastructure to do exactly that—first by accelerating the review process, then by automating routine decisions.

What’s more, faster onboarding directly translates to revenue uplift. Fewer clients abandon the process partway through, and faster customer acquisition cycles mean faster revenue recognition. Compliance transforms from a drag on the P&L into a lever for growth.

Scaling Through “Patches of Networks”

Duna’s path to scale won’t follow the typical venture playbook. Rather than trying to build a global network immediately—a chicken-and-egg problem that dooms many infrastructure plays—Duna is targeting what Van Lanschot calls “patches of networks”: tightly connected groups of companies where reusable KYB data creates immediate benefits.

Consider a manufacturing supply chain where three or four companies share customers and need to verify each other repeatedly. Or a private equity network where multiple firms are evaluating the same businesses. Or a cohort of companies operating within a single small country’s regulatory environment. In these patches, the value of a shared identity layer becomes tangible before network effects reach critical mass.

By dominating these micronetworks first, Duna can generate case studies, reference customers, and data that makes onboarding the next patch increasingly efficient. It’s a patient, pragmatic approach to infrastructure scaling—one that acknowledges constraints but exploits them strategically.

The Path to One-Click B2B Onboarding

If Duna succeeds in building the foundational infrastructure for a reusable business identity network, the consequences could be profound. Enterprise onboarding today remains a process littered with friction: duplicate KYC submissions, redundant compliance reviews, inconsistent data standards.

One-click onboarding for businesses would be a paradigm shift—enabling Plaid, Moss, and dozens of other platforms to trust identity data verified elsewhere, dramatically reducing the time and cost to acquire and serve new B2B customers. For the financial system, this could unlock trillions in trapped economic value currently locked behind compliance workflows.

Duna’s €30 million Series A doesn’t guarantee success. But it signals that the market is finally ready to invest in fixing a problem that has persisted for decades. The Stripe alumni network, through Duna, is making another consequential bet on infrastructure.