Duna, a startup founded by two former Stripe employees and based in Germany and the Netherlands, has secured a €10.7 million seed round to develop tools that streamline identity verification for businesses.
The all-equity round was led by global venture capital firm Index Ventures, with additional support from German investor Puzzle Ventures.
As reported by Sifted, the round also saw participation from a number of prominent business angels, including Alexandre Prot (cofounder of Qonto), Jean-Charles Samuelian (cofounder of Alan), Eléonore Crespo (cofounder of Pigment), and Guillaume Princen (an executive at Anthropic).
Launched in 2023, Duna was founded by Duco Van Lanschot, previously head of Benelux and DACH at Stripe for three years, and David Schreiber, who spent six years at Stripe leading product teams.
Know your customer (KYC) and know your business (KYB) refer to the mandatory processes of verifying individual and business customers to prevent money laundering, fraud and other financial crimes.
These checks are particularly crucial for companies operating in regulated industries such as finance and insurance.
Online marketplaces handling users’ funds must also comply with these regulations.
However, these procedures remain slow and prone to error, often requiring manual verification of personal information and business documents, sometimes across jurisdictions.
Ongoing monitoring is also needed, making the process even more resource-intensive.
“Financial technology companies, banks, investment companies, commercial real estate companies, they are spending an insane amount of resources to work on this topic, which is mission critical but non core,”
Duco van Lanschot told Sifted.
He noted that long onboarding times can deter customers and result in lost revenue.
“I sent dollars to the US with Duna, and it took me 16 back and forths to get checked and go through KYB,”
he said.
Duna is developing software focused on business identification that automates this process and helps companies onboard enterprise customers more efficiently.
One client reportedly reduced its onboarding time from eight days to just two hours using the platform.
The startup now has a team of nearly 20 and works with several customers, including US fintech firm Plaid, Spanish payments platform SeQura and Dutch bank Brand New Day.
Its business model combines subscriptions with variable fees.
Looking ahead, Duna aims to build a global network of “shareable identities”, allowing businesses to use a digital passport for instant verification across multiple platforms.
Featured image credit: edited from freepik
