Stripe alumni raise €30M Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen execs

Anthropic and OpenAI may be competitors, but their presidents — Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman — share a common background: both are alums of Stripe. With former Stripe employees having gone on to found dozens of startups, the fintech giant has earned a reputation as one of tech’s most prolific “founder factories.” Capital is continuing to follow that talent.

The latest example is Duna, a business identity verification company that has raised a €30 million Series A round, making it the best-funded European startup to emerge from the so-called “Stripe mafia.” The funding was led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth-stage investment arm, which has also been a Stripe backer since co-leading the company’s Series D in 2016.

Duna is headquartered across Germany and the Netherlands and was co-founded by Stripe alumni Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. The startup works with customers such as Plaid, helping fintech firms onboard business customers more efficiently while reducing the friction and churn often associated with corporate identity checks and fraud prevention processes.

Stripe itself is not a Duna customer, van Lanschot said, but Stripe executives were well positioned to recognize the opportunity Duna is pursuing — a fact reflected in the company’s cap table. Angel investors include former Stripe executives David Singleton, Claire Hughes Johnson, and Michael Cocoman. Even Stripe competitor Adyen joined in, with its CRCO, Mariëtte Swart, and CFO, Ethan Tandowsky, participating as angel investors.

Their backing also supports van Lanschot’s belief that large payment companies are unlikely to compete directly with Duna, even though they could. “It requires such fine-grained controls that change on a company-by-company basis, that an Adyen or a Stripe isn’t going to spin out their business onboarding as a separate product where another enterprise customer can change all of the configurations,” he told TechCrunch.

Duna is targeting the long tail of enterprise customers that lack the resources to build sophisticated business onboarding workflows internally. But the company’s ambition goes further: it aims to create a network that allows businesses to reuse their verified identity information across multiple platforms.

“What we want to build over time is a global trust infrastructure where we provide a digital passport for every business,” van Lanschot said. “So you can reuse your file from onboarding on [German spend management platform] Moss to onboard with Plaid, or you can reuse it to open up a bank account.”

That vision resonated with Alex Nichols, the general partner who led CapitalG’s investment. “I would say the common thing I look for in my investments is some sort of network effects, or more formal scale advantage,” Nichols said. “I also love it when founders have an earned insight about a problem they may not know about otherwise, and this is a perfect example of that.”

Duna operates in the KYB (Know Your Business) category, competing with vendors such as Jumio and Veriff. According to Nichols, what sets Duna apart is its decision to generate its own data rather than relying on aggregated third-party sources that are often incomplete or outdated. “It’s the rare opportunity to rebuild something as foundational as a Visa and create an amazing business in the process,” he said.

The startup says it already delivers clear value by helping customers onboard corporate users faster and at lower cost. That traction explains why existing investors increased their commitments. Index Ventures, which led Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025, joined the Series A, along with Puzzle Ventures and Frank Slootman.

Duna’s broader network-based ambition, however, will only fully materialize at scale — which is why the company is seeking shortcuts. Van Lanschot and his team are focusing on small clusters of interconnected businesses, which they call “patches of networks.” These can include manufacturing companies that share customers, investment firms with overlapping limited partners, or companies operating within the same small country. In these tightly connected groups, the ability to reuse verification data delivers immediate value, even before full network effects emerge.

The markets may be geographically small, but the opportunity is significant. “In the Netherlands alone — a tiny, tiny country — the four biggest banks employ 14,000 people in compliance, and half of them are working on businesses,” van Lanschot said. CapitalG later clarified that roughly 13,000 people work in compliance across all Dutch banks. Either way, while Duna will not replace these roles outright, AI-driven automation can meaningfully reduce costs and generate revenue well before the network reaches critical mass.

If Duna ultimately becomes the infrastructure layer for a reusable business identity network, an even larger opportunity could emerge: one-click business onboarding. That would put it in the realm of Amazon’s one-click checkout — or, in B2B terms, Stripe’s own Stripe Link. Once again, with Duna, the Stripe connection is never far away.