Anthropic and OpenAI are possible competitionbut its presidents Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman have one thing in common: they are both Stripe alumni. With former employees going on to create dozens of startups, the fintech company has become one of the most productive”factory founder“- and the money. The latest example: the business identity verification startup Duna, which just raised Series A € 30 million to become the best-funded European member of the so-called “Mafia Stripe.” The funding round was led by Alphabet’s growth fund ModalGwhich has also been made by Stripe since co-lead series D in 2016.
Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was co-founded by Stripe alumni Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber. With customers included PlaidThe startup helps fintech companies onboard business customers more efficiently, reducing the typical churn associated with company ID checks and other fraud prevention measures.
Stripe is not a customer of Duna, Van Lanschot said, but the executives are well placed to understand the opportunity the startup is holding, which is reflected in the closing table. The company’s angel investors include Stripe’s current COO Michael Coogan and former executives David Singleton (CTO) and Claire Hughes Johnson (COO). Even Stripe’s rival Adyen got involved, with CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky as angels.
endorsements also validate Van Lanschot’s hunch that this company will not compete with Duna, even if they could. “It requires very fine-grained controls that change by company, so Adyen or Stripe won’t spin off business onboarding as a separate product where other companies’ customers can change the entire configuration,” TechCrunch said.
If it is still worth the effort for Duna, it is because the startup is going after the long tail of corporate clients that do not have large resources to dedicate to business onboarding. But also because the vision doesn’t stop there: Duna’s ambition is to build a network that allows companies to reuse 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. So you can reuse the file from onboarding in (German spend management platform) Moss to onboard with Plaid, or you can reuse it to open a bank account,” said Van Lanschot.
This goal resonated with Alex Nichols, the general partner who led CapitalG’s investment to Series A. “I would say the general thing I look for in investments is some sort of network effect, or a more formal size advantage,” said TechCrunch. “I also love when the founders have an insight into a problem they may not know about otherwise, and this is a very good example,” he added.
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Duna has a competitor in the category known as KYB, or Know Your Business. This includes vendors such as Jumio and Veriff. But for Nichols, what sets Duna apart is its decision to generate its own data, rather than trying to gather existing data sources that are often lacking. “It’s a rare opportunity to rebuild something as fundamental as Visa and create an amazing business in the process.”
Duna says it has found a strong business case to help customers in enterprise users faster and cheaper. This also explains why the existing investor doubled: Index Ventures, which leads Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025, participating in Series A, as well as puzzle Ventures and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman. But the startup’s larger ambitions won’t pay off until Duna reaches significant scale. So companies are looking for shortcuts.
How? Van Lanschot and Duna’s team identified clusters of small companies that had overlaps – what they called “network patches.” These include manufacturing companies with shared customers, investment companies with overlapping LPs, or companies in the same small country. In this close-knit group, the ability to reuse verification becomes important, even before Duna achieves its full network effect.
The country may be small, but the opportunities are big, Van Lanschot said. “In the Netherlands alone – a small and small country – the four largest banks employ 14,000 people, and half of them work in business.” Duna won’t replace all these jobs yet, but AI automation can save costs and generate profits even before the network effect kicks in.
If Duna eventually provides rails for identity networks, there may be a greater opportunity to take advantage of this position to enable one-click business onboarding. This will be similar to Amazon’s one-click checkout – or closer to B2B, to Stripe Link. Once again with Duna, the Stripe connection is not too far away.