Anthropic and OpenAI are recognised for their intense rivalry in the AI industry, yet they share a notable commonality: their presidents, Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman, are both alumni of Stripe. Originally a fintech company, Stripe has evolved into what can be called a “founder factory,” fostering a significant number of entrepreneurial talents who are now launching numerous startups.
Not only Amodei and Brockman, but Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber also came into the limelight by creating the business identity verification startup Duna. The start-up recently raised a 30-million-euro Series A to become the best-funded European member of the so-called “Stripe Mafia.”
Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna has a rich portfolio of customers, including American financial services company Plaid. Duna helps fintech companies onboard business customers more efficiently, reducing the typical churn associated with corporate ID checks and other fraud prevention measures.
Creating Digital Passports For Companies
According to Duco van Lanschot, Stripe is not a typical customer of Duna, with the fintech giant’s executives understanding the opportunity that the start-up was about to seize in terms of making the process of onboarding business customers simpler and more efficient. What followed was big shots like former Stripe executives David Singleton, Claire Hughes Johnson, and Michael Cocoman getting involved in the funding round as angel investors. Even Stripe rival Adyen participated in the round.
Now, what exactly is the start-up trying to achieve? Apart from going after the long tail of enterprise clients that don’t have huge resources to dedicate to business onboarding, Duna sees its existential future in a world where there will be a network that allows companies to reuse their verified identity information across multiple platforms through a digital passport mechanism.
This goal resonated with Alex Nichols, the general partner who led CapitalG’s investment into the Series A. For Nichols, what sets Duna apart is its decision to generate its own data, rather than trying to aggregate existing data sources that are often lacking.
While Duna has reportedly found a strong business case in helping customers onboard corporate users faster and cheaper, existing investors are further doubling down. Index Ventures, which led Duna’s 10.7-million-euro seed round in May 2025, participated in the Series A, as did Puzzle Ventures and Frank Slootman, chairman of Snowflake.
However, to fulfil the immediate goal of reaching scale, Duna is taking shortcuts by identifying small clusters of companies that already overlap with each other. The start-up calls them “patches of networks.” These include manufacturing companies with shared customers, investment firms with overlapping LPs, or companies in the same small country. In Duco van Lanschot’s opinion, in these tight-knit groups, the ability to reuse verification becomes valuable immediately, even before Duna achieves full network effects.
Instead of replacing these jobs, Duna, through its AI automation, wants to help human professionals save costs and generate revenue even before the network effects kick in. If Duna eventually provides the rails for an identity network, Duco van Lanschot sees a bigger opportunity opening for the start-up, where the venture will enable one-click business onboarding.
The Products
Duna’s “Onboard,” built with the standards of regulated enterprises top of mind, provides compliant onboarding journeys optimised for conversion. The product helps its users access 20-plus ready-made KYB (Know Your Business) modules (including business details, legal representatives, ownership and UBO, AML screening, bank account, and address proof), apart from fine-tuning every data field to fit their enterprise needs.
Through the solution, Duna’s team of engineers and designers takes over their clients’ headache of converting potential leads into sales by dynamically shaping onboarding based on risk scoring, assessing data points in real time, and adapting journeys automatically. Businesses also get to avoid losing customers by asking for basic information at account creation and collecting additional KYC data based on product usage.
Companies can facilitate private interactions with legal representatives and Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) to collect essential information such as identity verification, source of funds, contract signatures, and more. Most importantly, instead of using separate onboarding platforms for different products, companies can save money by consolidating all solutions and their varying compliance policies under one digital umbrella.
Next is “Decide,” Duna’s automated case management mechanism, which increases compliance quality and reduces costs by cutting out lengthy reviews, manual checks, and endless email back-and-forth. The solution standardises these tedious functions by automatically adapting workflows based on risk signals, customer type, and compliance policies, leveraging AI and various other KYC technologies that verify and extract customer documents.
If a financial company has its pre-set compliance criteria, all it needs to do is feed the details into the automated case management system, after which it will take over the task of approving customer applications as per the established rules.
The solution also scores high on the AML (Anti-Money Laundering) front by fully automating hits on PEP (Politically Exposed Person), sanctions, and adverse media, with outsourced OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) investigations. Duna’s automated case management mechanism has already proven its worth through its ongoing stint with some of the trusted names in the global financial industry, including Moody’s, Fourthline, LexisNexis, SurePay, Creditsafe, and IDnow.
Innovation Simplifying Things
Another excellent piece of Duna’s innovation is “Lifecycle,” which manages compliance throughout the customer lifecycle. Regulation meets retention with perpetual KYC, daily screening, re-KYC, policy versioning, and management of legal agreements.
Lifecycle is special because it automatically monitors Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), sanctions, and adverse media related to business customers, individuals, and affiliated organisations. In addition, it tracks changes in registry data, such as legal names, addresses, and representatives. Lifecycle initiates re-Know Your Customer (KYC) processes based on real-time insights from registries, media, and open-source data. It also establishes re-verification frequencies tailored to the risk levels and timeframes of client companies.
The solution addresses evolving compliance requirements through a single interface that allows for the rollout of updated policies across various products, embedded finance partners, and jurisdictions. It implements ongoing changes based on regulations, product developments, and risk appetite, while also applying different policies according to regulatory jurisdictions. Additionally, it streamlines policy requirements across the financial partners of the client’s business.