Duna Secures €30M Series A: Inside the Stripe Alumni Success Story

Duna, a Berlin and Amsterdam-based business identity verification startup, has just closed a €30 million Series A funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth investment fund. This achievement marks a significant milestone: Duna is now the most well-funded European company to emerge from Stripe’s legendary alumni network. The funding comes with backing from some of the industry’s most recognizable figures, signaling strong confidence in the company’s vision and execution.

The parallel success stories are striking. While Anthropic and OpenAI have become synonymous with AI innovation, few realize that both Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman—among their top leaders—came from the same place: Stripe. This pattern continues with Duna. Stripe has increasingly positioned itself as a launchpad for successful founders, with an impressive track record of alumni-led ventures. What makes Duna particularly noteworthy is the caliber of support it has attracted, not just from Stripe insiders, but from competitors as well.

From Stripe to €30M: How Duna Built Trust in Business Identity Verification

Duna was founded by Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber, both former Stripe employees who identified a critical gap in how businesses handle customer onboarding. The company operates in the Know Your Business (KYB) space, helping fintech platforms and enterprise service providers streamline the verification process for corporate clients. The result: faster onboarding, reduced fraud risk, and lower customer churn.

One key advantage Duna brings is simplicity. Rather than requiring large compliance teams to manually verify each business’s identity, Duna automates significant portions of the process. Clients like Plaid have already experienced the benefits, completing corporate onboarding cycles faster and at lower cost than traditional methods. While Stripe hasn’t become a Duna client itself, the payment giant’s leadership team has enthusiastically backed the venture—a telling sign of its strategic importance.

The Series A round attracted participation from earlier investors like Index Ventures (which led Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025) and Puzzle Ventures, alongside new backers. Even Frank Slootman, chairman of Snowflake, decided to invest, underlining the opportunity Duna represents to high-profile tech executives.

Why Giants Like Stripe and Adyen Back Duna Instead of Competing

What may seem paradoxical—why wouldn’t Stripe simply build this capability in-house?—actually makes strategic sense. Business identity verification requires extreme customization. Every enterprise has different compliance requirements, customer types, and risk tolerance. Offering KYB as a standalone product that other companies could configure would dilute focus and complicate product development. For Stripe and Adyen, it’s simply not their core play.

This logic convinced some surprising allies to invest in Duna. Mariëtte Swart, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Adyen, and Ethan Tandowsky, Adyen’s CFO, both invested alongside Stripe executives—including Michael Coogan (Stripe COO), David Singleton (former CTO), and Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO). These are not passive bets. They signal recognition of a market need that even the largest payment platforms can serve better through partnership than through direct competition.

CapitalG partner Alex Nichols, who led the Series A, sees Duna’s differentiation precisely here. Unlike KYB competitors like Jumio and Veriff, which often aggregate data from multiple third-party sources, Duna generates its own verification data. This foundation-building approach mirrors how Visa revolutionized payments—a chance to construct something foundational that creates lasting competitive advantage.

The ‘Patches of Network’ Strategy: Duna’s Path to Global Scale

Duna’s long-term ambition extends far beyond today’s onboarding challenges. The company envisions creating a reusable business identity network—a kind of digital passport for enterprises. Imagine this: when a business completes KYB verification with Moss, it doesn’t have to repeat the same verification process when connecting to Plaid or opening a bank account. The verified identity travels with them.

To build this network at scale, Duna isn’t pursuing a mass-market approach immediately. Instead, Van Lanschot’s team is targeting what they call “patches of networks”—tightly connected groups of companies that benefit immediately from shared verification infrastructure. These might be manufacturing clusters with overlapping supply chains, investment firms with shared limited partners, or businesses concentrated in smaller geographies.

This strategy is clever because network effects don’t require global critical mass to generate value. Even in the Netherlands, a relatively small market, the upside is substantial. The country’s four largest banks employ 14,000 people in compliance roles, with roughly half focused on business clients. AI-powered verification can already reduce costs and unlock revenue for these institutions before Duna’s network reaches its ultimate scale.

From Business Onboarding to Digital Passport: Duna’s Ambitious Vision

The ultimate prize Duna is pursuing resembles Stripe’s own breakthrough: a seamless, one-click experience for business transactions. Just as Stripe Link transformed B2B payments, a universal business identity network could transform how enterprises onboard with any service provider. The friction would drop to near zero, and the value would be immense.

For this vision to materialize, Duna must first prove it can scale from current operations to networked model. The company has demonstrated clear product-market fit—customers are adopting faster and more cost-effectively than with legacy solutions. The €30 million infusion provides runway to pursue both expansion and network building simultaneously.

What remains to be seen is whether the “patches of networks” strategy can evolve into true global network effects. If it does, Duna could become to business identity what Stripe became to payments: a foundational infrastructure that powers the next generation of financial services. Given the caliber of investors backing the company—and the practical support from Stripe and Adyen veterans—the trajectory is clearly set. Duna’s journey from Stripe’s alumni network to industry architect is only just beginning.