Duna's €30M Series A: How Stripe Alumni Are Building the Trust Infrastructure for Enterprise Identity

Introduction: The Rise of the Stripe Mafia and Identity Verification

When we talk about "founder factories" in the startup ecosystem, few companies command as much attention as Stripe. The fintech giant has become a veritable incubator of successful entrepreneurs, spawning dozens of ventures that have gone on to secure significant funding and market traction. The phenomenon is so prevalent that it's earned its own designation: the "Stripe mafia." This network of former Stripe employees has created startups spanning everything from AI research (Anthropic and OpenAI) to infrastructure tools, productivity platforms, and specialized fintech solutions. What makes this ecosystem particularly interesting is that investors have begun to recognize the pattern—they understand that founders with Stripe experience bring deep domain expertise, operational excellence, and access to networks that can accelerate growth.

The latest and most prominent example of this founder network in action is Duna, a business identity verification startup that just secured a €30 million Series A funding round led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG. This funding represents a significant milestone for the company and solidifies its position as one of the most well-capitalized European startups founded by Stripe alumni. But Duna's success story is about far more than just riding the coattails of Stripe's prestige—it represents a fundamental shift in how enterprises approach identity verification and business onboarding.

The business identity verification space, known as KYB (Know Your Business), has been an underserved market for years. While consumer-facing KYC (Know Your Customer) solutions have proliferated, the enterprise side of identity verification has remained fragmented, expensive, and operationally burdensome. Companies like Jumio and Veriff have built substantial businesses in this space, but they've largely focused on aggregating existing data sources and providing basic verification capabilities. Duna, by contrast, is approaching the problem from a fundamentally different angle: building ground-truth data and creating network effects around business identity.

What makes this funding announcement particularly significant is not just the amount raised, but who is backing the company. Alongside CapitalG, the Series A included participation from Index Ventures (which led the €10.7 million seed round), Puzzle Ventures, and notably, Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman. But perhaps most tellingly, the angel investor list reads like a who's who of payments and fintech leadership: current Stripe COO Michael Coogan, former Stripe CTO David Singleton, former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson, and even Stripe rival Adyen's CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky. The fact that executives from competing companies are willing to back Duna speaks volumes about the opportunity they see in the market and their confidence in the founders' vision.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Duna, the business identity verification market, and the broader implications of this funding round for enterprise onboarding infrastructure. We'll examine what makes Duna different, why investors are so enthusiastic about its potential, and what the company's ambitions mean for the future of identity infrastructure.

Understanding the KYB Market: The Problem Duna Is Solving

The Current State of Business Onboarding

Business onboarding has become increasingly complex in the modern regulatory environment. Financial institutions, fintech platforms, and enterprise SaaS companies must comply with increasingly stringent AML (Anti-Money Laundering), CFT (Combating the Financing of Terrorism), and various local regulatory requirements. These requirements mean that when a new business customer wants to open an account, sign a contract, or access services, companies must verify the legitimacy of that business, confirm the identity of its beneficial owners, and ensure that the business is not engaged in prohibited activities.

The challenge is that this verification process is far more complex than it might initially appear. A business is not a single entity—it's a web of relationships. There are owners, beneficial owners (who may be different from nominal owners), officers, directors, partners, and other stakeholders. Each jurisdiction has different requirements about which ownership structures must be disclosed and to what depth. The data sources used to verify business identity are fragmented: government registries, corporate databases, banking information, public records, and third-party data aggregators all maintain different information about the same business, and they often contradict each other.

Currently, most large enterprises handle this process manually or with a combination of manual and automated steps. Companies like Stripe and Adyen have built their own internal systems for handling business onboarding because the problem is so specific to their needs and so important to their business model. But for smaller and mid-market companies, the options are limited. Either they build the system themselves (expensive and requires significant compliance expertise) or they use off-the-shelf solutions that may not fully address their specific regulatory requirements.

This is where KYB vendors have historically come in. Companies like Jumio, Veriff, and others provide pre-built solutions for verifying businesses. However, these solutions have fundamental limitations: they're typically based on aggregating existing data sources rather than generating ground-truth information, they often require manual review for edge cases or unusual business structures, and they're not designed to work across multiple platforms or create any kind of network effects.

The Efficiency and Cost Problem

Duna's founders identified a specific pain point within this broader problem: the inefficiency and cost of the current business onboarding process. According to data presented during Duna's fundraising discussions, the typical business onboarding process at major financial institutions is extraordinarily expensive in terms of human capital. In the Netherlands alone—a market of roughly 17.5 million people—the four largest banks employ approximately 14,000 people in compliance roles. Remarkably, roughly half of these compliance workers (7,000 people) spend significant portions of their time on business onboarding and verification activities.

Extended to the entire European financial system, and then globally, these numbers are staggering. This represents hundreds of thousands of highly trained (and expensive) professionals spending their time on routine verification tasks that could potentially be automated. The cost to enterprises is not just the direct labor cost of these employees, but also the opportunity cost—the complexity of the onboarding process means that businesses often delay or abandon the process, leading to customer acquisition funnel leakage.

From a customer perspective, the problem manifests as long onboarding times and high churn rates. Duna's early customer feedback revealed that business customers were becoming frustrated with the time it took to open accounts or activate services, and many would simply give up if the process took too long. This friction in the onboarding process translates to lost revenue for fintech platforms and financial institutions.

Why Existing Solutions Fall Short

The existing KYB solutions on the market have attempted to address this problem, but with limited success. The fundamental issue is that these solutions are based on aggregating existing data sources—government registries, corporate databases, and third-party data providers. While this approach works reasonably well for straightforward business structures, it struggles when confronted with the complex realities of modern business ownership.

Consider a simple scenario: a limited liability company with multiple owners, including another company, which itself has multiple owners. To fully verify the business under most regulatory regimes, you need to drill down through the entire ownership chain to identify all beneficial owners. Existing data aggregation solutions may fail to do this properly because the information is spread across multiple databases that don't talk to each other, or because the information is stored in inconsistent formats across jurisdictions.

Moreover, existing solutions typically lack what the industry calls "network effects." When a business is verified by one platform, that verification information is siloed to that platform. If the same business wants to open an account with a different platform, it must go through much of the verification process again. There's no way to reuse the verified information, no mechanism for that verification to become more valuable as more platforms use it, and no way for businesses to benefit from having been verified once.

Duna's Approach: Building Ground-Truth Data and Network Effects

A Different Model: Generating Rather Than Aggregating Data

Duna's founders, Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber, both of whom come from Stripe where they likely worked on onboarding and verification problems, took a fundamentally different approach to KYB. Rather than attempting to aggregate existing data sources, Duna is building its own ground-truth data about business identities. This is a critical distinction that gets to the heart of why the company is so well-funded and why even competitors like Adyen's executives are investing in it.

Generating ground-truth data means going directly to authoritative sources—government business registries, legal documents, beneficial ownership registrations, and other primary sources—and ingesting this data into Duna's system. By organizing this data in a standardized way and enriching it with additional research and verification, Duna builds a comprehensive, reliable database of business identity information. This is significantly more expensive than simply aggregating data from third-party providers, which is why Duna needed the substantial funding from CapitalG.

However, this approach has enormous advantages. First, the data is more accurate because it comes from primary sources rather than second-hand aggregation. Second, because Duna controls the data generation process, it can standardize formats and ensure consistency across jurisdictions and business types. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Duna can build a platform on top of this data that allows for reuse and network effects—the ultimate vision of creating a "global trust infrastructure" for businesses.

The Vision: A Digital Passport for Businesses

Duna's long-term ambition extends well beyond simply being a better KYB provider. Van Lanschot articulated a vision of building a global trust infrastructure with a digital passport for every business. The idea is that once a business has been comprehensively verified and its identity information has been standardized and stored in Duna's system, that business should be able to reuse that verification across multiple platforms.

Imagine the user experience: a business owner completes comprehensive onboarding with one fintech platform (say, a spend management tool), providing all necessary documentation and undergoing full verification. In an ideal world, that same business should then be able to open an account with a different fintech platform (perhaps a banking platform), and rather than starting the verification process from scratch, the new platform could simply verify the business's identity using Duna's platform. The business would not need to re-upload documents, re-provide information, or undergo duplicate verification.

This vision creates substantial network effects. The value of Duna's platform increases with each new customer because businesses that have been verified become increasingly valuable assets—they can be verified with other platforms more quickly and cheaply. Platforms using Duna benefit because their onboarding process becomes faster and simpler. And businesses themselves benefit because they only need to undergo comprehensive verification once, rather than repeatedly.

Compare this to how consumer identity works today in many contexts. A consumer can use their identity information with multiple platforms—they log in with Google, Apple, or Facebook across numerous services. They don't have to re-provide basic identity information each time. This convenience has been a significant factor in driving adoption and engagement across the internet. Duna is essentially trying to create the enterprise equivalent: a reusable, trusted business identity credential.

Why Competitors Won't Build This Themselves

One might ask: if this is such a valuable opportunity, why haven't Stripe or Adyen simply built this themselves? Why are they backing Duna instead of competing with it?

Van Lanschot provided insight into this question. He noted that building business onboarding requires enormous amounts of fine-grained control that varies from company to company. Each enterprise has different regulatory requirements, different risk appetites, different business models, and different requirements for how they want to customize the verification process. For a large payment processor or bank to build a separate product that other enterprises could customize and use directly would require them to expose significant amounts of their internal logic and control systems. This would be complex, expensive, and potentially risky from a business perspective.

Moreover, there are competitive considerations. Stripe and Adyen are platforms themselves, and they may not want to compete with their customers by building a separate business onboarding product. If a payments processor builds and sells a KYB solution, it might be licensing that solution to its competitors or to platforms that could theoretically compete with it in other areas.

Duna, by contrast, can position itself as neutral infrastructure—a vendor that works with all platforms, regardless of whether they compete with each other. This neutral positioning is actually more valuable to the market than any given company trying to build it internally. As such, even though Stripe and Adyen could theoretically build this business themselves, they have more to gain by supporting a neutral, specialized company that focuses exclusively on business identity verification.

The Founding Team and Stripe Mafia Connection

Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber: Building From Stripe Experience

Duna's success to date, and the investor enthusiasm surrounding it, cannot be separated from the backgrounds and track records of its founders. Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber both come from Stripe, where they likely gained deep insight into the challenges of business onboarding at scale. Working at Stripe during a period of explosive growth would have given them firsthand exposure to all the pain points that Duna is now attempting to solve.

This "earned insight," as CapitalG's investing partner Alex Nichols called it, is worth significantly more than typical domain expertise. Founders who have lived through a problem—who have spent years inside a company grappling with it, attempting to solve it, and perhaps failing or partially succeeding—bring something that external research or analysis simply cannot replicate. They understand not just the theoretical problem, but the practical implementation challenges, the edge cases, the regulatory nuances, and the actual customer behavior patterns.

Moreover, Stripe alumni carry significant credibility and access. The Stripe network extends throughout the entire fintech and payments ecosystem. Stripe alumni have good relationships with other Stripe alumni who have gone on to found or lead other companies. They likely have relationships with many of Stripe's customers, including many of the companies most likely to be Duna's early customers. This network can be invaluable for customer acquisition, especially in the early stages.

Accessing the Stripe Mafia Network

The angel investor list for Duna reads like a map of the Stripe decision-making hierarchy. Michael Coogan, current COO of Stripe, is an angel. David Singleton, former CTO, is an angel. Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO, is an angel. Each of these individuals brings significant credibility and can help open doors within the fintech ecosystem.

Notably, the investment also includes backing from Stripe's major rival, Adyen. The fact that Adyen's CRCO and CFO are willing to back Duna suggests that even competitors recognize the value of a neutral, focused business identity verification platform. This speaks to the strength of Duna's positioning and the importance of the problem it's solving.

The diversity of the cap table—including both traditional venture capital (CapitalG, Index Ventures, Puzzle Ventures), strategic angels (Stripe executives), and competing payment processors (Adyen)—suggests that investors and industry players across the ecosystem are convinced of Duna's potential.

Market Opportunity and Competitive Landscape

Sizing the KYB Market

The market for business identity verification and KYB solutions is substantial and growing. The regulatory environment continues to tighten globally, with increasing requirements for beneficial ownership transparency, AML compliance, and sanctions screening. Financial institutions, fintech companies, and increasingly, traditional enterprises are all seeking better solutions for business onboarding and verification.

The market includes both the direct B2B2C segment (platforms selling KYB solutions to financial institutions and fintech companies) and the embedded compliance market (where verification capabilities are built into larger platforms). Both segments are growing as regulatory pressure increases and as customers increasingly demand friction-free onboarding experiences.

Estimates for the broader identity verification market (including both KYC and KYB) typically range in the billions of dollars globally. While specific market sizing data for KYB alone is harder to pin down (as it's often bundled with KYC or broader compliance solutions), the segment represents a substantial opportunity.

Existing Competitors: Jumio and Veriff

Duna's primary established competitors in the KYB space are Jumio and Veriff. Both companies have built substantial businesses providing verification solutions and have achieved significant valuations and customer bases.

Jumio, founded in 2010, has focused on identity verification and has expanded into KYB with its Jumio Net Verify solution. Jumio has raised over $250 million in funding and serves enterprise customers globally. The company positions itself as a comprehensive identity verification platform.

Veriff, founded in 2014, has similarly built a verification platform that serves both KYC and KYB use cases. Veriff has raised over

330 million in funding and has achieved a valuation in excess of

2 billion. Like Jumio, Veriff serves enterprise customers and financial institutions globally.

Both companies have taken an approach centered on aggregating data from multiple sources and layering machine learning and human verification on top. Both have built substantial customer bases and achieved profitability or near-profitability.

Why Duna Is Positioned Differently

While Jumio and Veriff are strong competitors, Duna's approach is fundamentally different in ways that could give it significant competitive advantages:

Data Quality and Ownership: Duna generates its own ground-truth data rather than aggregating data from existing sources. This gives Duna more control over data quality and allows the company to optimize its data for specific use cases (business identity verification) rather than trying to adapt general-purpose data aggregation to KYB.

Network Effects: Duna's vision of a reusable business identity credential creates network effects that simple data aggregation cannot. As more platforms use Duna for verification, the value of Duna's service increases for each subsequent platform. This is a more sustainable competitive advantage than simply being a better data aggregator.

Focus and Specialization: While Jumio and Veriff serve both KYC and KYB use cases (among others), Duna is specifically focused on business identity verification. This focus allows the company to build more specialized solutions tailored to the specific needs of the KYB market.

Timing and Capital: Duna has raised substantial capital at an early stage, which allows the company to invest heavily in data generation and platform development before competitors respond. The €30 million Series A gives Duna significant resources to execute on its vision.

Founder Credibility: The Stripe connection and the support of Stripe and Adyen executives provide Duna with credibility and access to potential customers that a startup without this pedigree might lack.

Strategic Insight: Patches of Networks and Path to Scale

The Challenge of Building Network Effects from Scratch

One of the central challenges Duna faces is that network effects typically require substantial scale before they become valuable. The classic network effects strategy—where the value of the platform increases with each additional user—requires reaching critical mass. Until that critical mass is reached, the network effects are largely theoretical.

Duna's approach to this challenge is creative and potentially insightful. Rather than trying to achieve global scale all at once, the company is focusing on identifying and operating within "patches of networks"—small clusters of companies that already have overlapping customer relationships or business connections.

Examples of Network Patches

Duna identified several types of network patches where the value of reusable business identity credentials could be realized at smaller scales:

Manufacturing Supply Chains: Manufacturing companies in specific regions or industries often work with the same customers, suppliers, and financial partners. Creating a reusable business identity credential within this network could create immediate value, even before global network effects are achieved.

Investment and Venture Capital: Investment firms, especially within specific geographies or industry focuses, often have overlapping limited partners (LPs). A business identity verification network within the venture capital and private equity ecosystem could create immediate value.

Geographic Clusters: While the Netherlands is a "tiny, tiny country" in global terms, it has a sophisticated financial system with multiple major banks and numerous fintech companies. Creating a comprehensive business identity network within the Netherlands could be valuable and could be achieved with a manageable amount of effort and data generation.

The Economics of Patches Strategy

This patches strategy is economically sensible. Rather than spending massive resources trying to build a global network with limited adoption, Duna can focus on specific patches where network effects become valuable at smaller scales. Success in these patches can then provide proof of concept and momentum for expansion to other patches.

Moreover, this strategy allows Duna to generate revenue and demonstrate business viability relatively quickly, rather than betting entirely on achieving future global scale. The company can save money and generate revenue in the short term while building toward the larger vision in the longer term.

Funding Details and Cap Table Analysis

Series A Funding Round Structure

Duna's €30 million Series A round was led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth-stage investment fund. CapitalG has a track record of investing in high-growth, capital-efficient companies and has previously backed Stripe (co-leading its Series D in 2016). The choice of CapitalG as the lead investor signals that Duna is not just a promising seed-stage company, but a company with demonstrated business traction and clear path to significant scale.

The Series A round included participation from existing investors. Index Ventures, which led Duna's €10.7 million seed round in May 2025, participated in the Series A, demonstrating continued confidence in the company's direction and execution. Puzzle Ventures, another existing investor, also participated in the round.

Strategic Investors and Angels

Beyond the traditional venture capital investors, Duna's cap table includes several strategic angels and investors from the industry itself:

Michael Coogan (Stripe COO): As current Chief Operating Officer of Stripe, Coogan brings operational expertise at scale and deep knowledge of payment processing infrastructure.

David Singleton (Former Stripe CTO): Singleton's technical background positions him to advise on the technical architecture and scaling challenges Duna will face.

Claire Hughes Johnson (Former Stripe COO): Johnson's operational background, in a prior COO role, provides valuable expertise in scaling organizations and managing complex operational challenges.

Mariëtte Swart (Adyen CRCO): As Chief Revenue Officer at Adyen, a major Stripe competitor, Swart brings perspective on the payments industry from a different vantage point and can advise on market dynamics and customer perspectives.

Ethan Tandowsky (Adyen CFO): As Chief Financial Officer, Tandowsky brings financial and operational expertise and likely insight into how Adyen approaches financial compliance and KYB challenges.

Frank Slootman (Snowflake Chairman): Slootman's investment suggests interest in the data infrastructure aspects of Duna's business. Snowflake, as a data warehousing and analytics platform, has benefited from businesses' increasing need to manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Valuation and Post-Money Implications

While the funding announcement did not specify the post-money valuation, we can make some inferences based on typical Series A dynamics. Duna raised a €10.7 million seed round in May 2025 (roughly 9 months before the Series A announcement). If we assume a typical Series A represents a 2-4x increase in valuation from seed (which would be reasonable for a company with demonstrated traction), the post-money valuation for the Series A is likely in the range of €80-150 million.

This would suggest a pre-money valuation of roughly €50-120 million, depending on the specific terms. This represents a strong valuation for a European B2B startup at the Series A stage, reflecting investor confidence in the company's market opportunity and execution capability.

Business Model and Revenue Strategy

Current Customers and Use Cases

Duna's first publicly mentioned customer is Plaid, a significant fintech infrastructure company. Plaid provides APIs for connecting to financial institutions and has a substantial customer base in the personal finance and lending spaces. The partnership with Plaid suggests that Duna's business identity verification solution is sufficiently mature and reliable to be trusted by a major infrastructure company.

The Plaid partnership likely works as follows: businesses trying to use Plaid's services can go through Plaid's onboarding process, which now leverages Duna's business identity verification. This reduces the friction in Plaid's onboarding process and helps Plaid serve more customers more efficiently.

Revenue Models and Pricing

While specific pricing for Duna has not been publicly disclosed, we can infer likely pricing models based on industry standards and the nature of the business:

Per-Verification Pricing: The most common model in the KYB space is per-verification or per-lookup pricing. Companies are charged each time they verify a business. Pricing typically ranges from

5-

50 per verification, depending on the complexity of the verification and the volume discounts available.

Subscription Models: Some KYB providers offer subscription models where customers pay a flat monthly fee for access to a certain number of verifications. This provides more predictable revenue for the provider and lower variable costs for the customer.

Enterprise/Hybrid Models: For large enterprise customers with complex requirements, KYB providers often develop custom pricing arrangements that might include a combination of subscription fees, usage-based charges, and custom development.

Duna likely employs a hybrid approach, with volume-based per-verification pricing for mid-market customers and more customized arrangements for enterprise customers.

Path to Profitability

The €30 million Series A funding provides Duna with substantial capital to invest in data generation, product development, and go-to-market activities. However, the company is also generating revenue from current customers like Plaid.

A key claim in Duna's pitch is that the company has "already found a strong business case" for helping customers onboard corporate users faster and cheaper. This language suggests that Duna has demonstrated unit economics that work—that the company can generate revenue from customers that exceeds the cost of providing the service to those customers.

If Duna can maintain these unit economics while scaling customer acquisition, the company should be able to reach profitability relatively quickly, especially given the capital it has raised. This is different from many venture-backed software companies, which often trade near-term profitability for growth.

Technology and Data Infrastructure

Building Ground-Truth Data

The core of Duna's technology is its approach to building and maintaining ground-truth business identity data. This involves several key components:

Data Ingestion: Duna must ingest data from multiple sources—government business registries, beneficial ownership registries, corporate databases, and other authoritative sources. Different jurisdictions maintain this data in different formats and systems, so significant engineering effort is required to build connectors and pipelines.

Data Standardization: Once data is ingested from multiple sources, it must be standardized into a common format. Business naming conventions vary across jurisdictions (e.g., "Ltd." vs. "Ltd" vs. "Limited"), beneficial ownership structures vary, and identification systems vary. Standardizing across these variations is non-trivial.

Entity Resolution: A fundamental challenge in business data is that the same business entity can be referred to in multiple ways. A company might be registered under a legal name, operate under a trade name, have a DBA (doing business as) name, and be referred to by a shorthand name by customers. Entity resolution—the process of determining when two different records refer to the same entity—is essential.

Data Enrichment: Duna likely enriches the raw data with additional signals—corporate social network data, public filings, press releases, and other information sources—to build a more comprehensive picture of business identity and ownership.

Change Detection and Updates: Business ownership and structure changes over time. Duna must have systems in place to detect when changes occur and update its database accordingly.

Platform Architecture

On top of this data infrastructure, Duna builds a platform that allows customers to query and verify business identities. The platform must support:

API-Based Access: Customers integrate with Duna via APIs, allowing them to verify businesses programmatically as part of their onboarding flow.

Manual Review Tools: For complex cases or edge cases, human reviewers at Duna (or at the customer) need tools to manually review and verify business information.

Confidence Scoring: Rather than simply returning "verified" or "not verified," Duna likely returns confidence scores indicating how confident the system is in the verification, allowing customers to make risk-based decisions about how much additional review to require.

Reusability Infrastructure: To support the vision of reusable business identity credentials, Duna's platform must allow customers to benefit from verifications performed by other customers. This requires secure, privacy-respecting mechanisms for sharing verification information across customer boundaries.

Regulatory and Compliance Landscape

AML and KYB Regulations Driving Demand

One major factor driving demand for business identity verification is the increasingly stringent regulatory environment around AML (Anti-Money Laundering), CFT (Combating the Financing of Terrorism), and beneficial ownership transparency.

Many jurisdictions have implemented or are implementing requirements for beneficial ownership registries—databases that track who ultimately owns and controls businesses, beyond the nominal owners. The EU's AML Directive and subsequent Regulations, the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act (FinCEN BOI Reporting), and similar requirements in other jurisdictions all mandate that financial institutions and other regulated entities identify and verify beneficial owners.

These requirements create ongoing demand for KYB solutions. Regulated institutions cannot simply ignore these requirements, meaning they will continue to seek solutions that help them comply efficiently.

Compliance Burden and Competitive Advantage

For a company like Duna, the regulatory environment is both an opportunity and a challenge. The regulatory requirements create demand for the company's solution, but they also impose compliance burdens on Duna itself. The company must ensure that its verification processes meet regulatory standards, that its data handling practices comply with data protection regulations (GDPR in Europe, etc.), and that the company itself is not inadvertently facilitating money laundering or terrorist financing.

However, this regulatory burden also creates a competitive moat. Building a KYB solution that genuinely meets regulatory standards requires substantial investment in compliance infrastructure. This raises the barrier to entry for new competitors and makes it less likely that companies will try to build in-house solutions when a compliant, professional solution is available.

Customer Acquisition and Go-to-Market Strategy

Leveraging the Stripe Network

One significant advantage Duna has in customer acquisition is access to the Stripe ecosystem. Many of Stripe's customers would be potential customers for Duna. The Stripe connection provides warm introductions and credibility that would be difficult to replicate for a startup without this background.

Moreover, if Stripe itself were to integrate Duna's services into its platform (though Duna's founders stated that Stripe is not currently a customer), it could significantly accelerate Duna's customer acquisition.

Vertical and Horizontal Expansion

Duna's initial go-to-market strategy likely focuses on fintech companies and financial institutions—the traditional customers for KYB solutions. However, the company could expand horizontally to other enterprise categories that need to onboard business customers.

For example, business-focused SaaS companies, HR and payroll platforms, and B2B marketplaces all need to verify business customers. As Duna establishes traction in fintech, expanding to these adjacent verticals could be a logical next step.

Geographic Expansion

Given Duna's focus on patches of networks, geographic expansion is likely part of the long-term strategy. Starting with Europe (where the company is based), Duna could expand to other regions as it builds network effects in each geography.

Challenges and Risks

Data Acquisition and Maintenance Costs

Duna's strategy of building ground-truth data is more expensive than competitors' approaches of aggregating existing data sources. Obtaining data from government registries, handling jurisdiction-specific requirements, and maintaining data freshness requires significant ongoing investment.

If Duna's customer acquisition doesn't grow rapidly enough to scale the cost of data across a large customer base, the company could face unit economics challenges. The €30 million Series A provides a runway to invest in data, but this is ultimately a finite resource.

Complexity of Global Expansion

Business ownership structures, naming conventions, identification systems, and beneficial ownership requirements vary significantly across jurisdictions. What works in the Netherlands or Germany may not work in other European countries or globally. Expanding Duna's data infrastructure to new jurisdictions requires building relationships with data sources, understanding local requirements, and adapting the platform accordingly.

This complexity could slow international expansion and could be exploited by competitors who focus on specific geographies.

Competitive Response

Large, well-capitalized competitors like Jumio and Veriff are unlikely to stand still. They could respond to Duna's approach by improving their own data quality, building network effects of their own, or making strategic acquisitions to gain capabilities they lack.

Moreover, there's a risk that large platforms like Stripe or Adyen decide to more aggressively build their own solutions or acquire competitors to insource their KYB capabilities.

Regulatory Changes

Regulatory requirements around business identification and beneficial ownership continue to evolve. While this generally favors KYB solution providers, significant regulatory changes could create uncertainty or could affect the viability of certain aspects of Duna's business model.

The Stripe Mafia Phenomenon: Broader Implications

Why Stripe Produces Successful Founders

Stripe's success in spawning successful founder ventures is not accidental. Several factors contribute to it:

Scale Experience: Stripe serves millions of businesses globally and processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions. Employees who work at Stripe at scale learn how to build systems that work at scale.

Domain Expertise: Working at Stripe provides deep expertise in payments, fintech, compliance, and infrastructure—domains that are increasingly important to many startups.

Network Effects: Stripe employees develop networks throughout the fintech and venture capital ecosystems, relationships that can be valuable for new ventures.

Operational Excellence: Stripe is known for operational rigor and excellence. These practices rub off on employees who then apply them to their own ventures.

Founder Credibility: Having worked at a successful, prestigious company like Stripe gives founders credibility with investors and customers.

The Trend of Founder Factories

Stripe is not unique as a "founder factory." Other successful companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—have also spawned numerous successful startups. However, Stripe's concentrated focus on fintech and infrastructure may make it particularly productive as a founder factory in its domain.

This trend has implications for venture capital and startup ecosystems. Companies that attract talented people, expose them to significant problems at scale, and maintain strong networks tend to produce successful founders. This suggests that successful startups in an ecosystem can create positive feedback loops—successful companies produce founders who build new successful companies.

Financial Projections and Growth Scenarios

Conservative Scenario: Focus on European Market

In a conservative scenario, Duna focuses on establishing market leadership in Europe before attempting global expansion. In this scenario:

Year 2 (2026): Duna doubles its customer base, growing from a handful of customers to 10-20 enterprise customers. Revenue reaches €2-5 million annually.
Year 3 (2027): Continued expansion within Europe, with revenue reaching €8-15 million annually.
Year 4 (2028): European market maturation, with revenue reaching €20-30 million annually.
Series B Funding: Based on this trajectory, Duna could raise a Series B in 2027-2028 at a valuation of €300-500 million.

In this scenario, Duna becomes a profitable, sustainable company with strong margins and remains primarily a European company.

Growth Scenario: Global Network Effects

In a more aggressive scenario, Duna successfully builds global network effects and becomes a dominant player in KYB:

Year 2 (2026): Duna aggressively expands customer base to 20-40 customers and begins building network effects within key patches of networks. Revenue reaches €5-10 million.
Year 3 (2027): Network effects begin to accelerate as more platforms adopt Duna for business verification. Revenue reaches €15-30 million.
Year 4 (2028): Duna achieves significant market share in KYB globally, with revenue reaching €50-100 million.
Exit Timeline: Duna becomes an acquisition target for large fintech companies, payments processors, or enterprise software companies, exiting for $1-3 billion valuation.

In this scenario, Duna's vision of a global business identity network is achieved, and the company becomes a significant player in enterprise infrastructure.

Realistic Scenario: Hybrid Approach

Most likely, Duna's actual trajectory will be between these two extremes. The company will establish strong position in Europe while selectively expanding to other geographies and verticals. Revenue growth will be strong but not explosive. The company will likely raise a Series B funding round and continue building toward its long-term vision of a global trust infrastructure.

Lessons for Other Startups and Entrepreneurs

The Value of Founder Pedigree

Duna's success to date demonstrates the value of founder pedigree and track record. Investors and customers both weighted heavily the fact that Duna's founders came from Stripe and understood the problem deeply. For entrepreneurs without this kind of pedigree, the lessons might be:

Build Deep Expertise: Spend significant time deeply understanding a problem before attempting to build a solution.
Develop Networks: The relationships you build during your career can be invaluable when starting a company.
Solve Real Problems: Duna didn't invent a hypothetical problem—the founders experienced the problem firsthand and knew it was real.

The Importance of Positioning and Differentiation

Duna's approach—building ground-truth data rather than aggregating existing data—is fundamentally different from competitors. This differentiation is not based on marketing spin but on a genuine difference in approach. The lesson: differentiation based on real, meaningful product differences is more sustainable and more compelling to investors and customers than differentiation based on messaging alone.

Building Moats and Defensibility

Duna's approach of building a proprietary database of business identity information creates defensible advantages. As the database becomes more comprehensive and is used by more platforms, it becomes more valuable and harder to replicate. The lesson: think about how to build defensible advantages that strengthen over time, rather than building products that can be easily copied.

Future Outlook and Strategic Questions

Will Duna Achieve Its Vision of a Global Trust Infrastructure?

The fundamental question for Duna's long-term success is whether the company can achieve its stated vision of creating a global trust infrastructure for businesses. This is an ambitious vision, and there are legitimate questions about whether it's achievable:

Will network effects materialize? Building network effects is notoriously difficult. Will businesses actually reuse identity information across platforms, or will each platform continue to want to do its own verification?
Will jurisdictions cooperate? For a truly global system to work, Duna would need to successfully navigate regulatory and data requirements in many different jurisdictions. This is challenging.
Will competitors respond effectively? Large, well-capitalized competitors might develop their own approaches to network effects or might acquire companies to gain capabilities.

What's the Likelihood of Strategic Acquisition?

Given the high probability that Duna becomes an acquisition target for a larger company, investors should consider what potential acquirers might value. Companies that would likely be interested in acquiring Duna include:

Stripe: To insource its KYB capabilities and reduce dependence on third-party vendors.
Other Payment Processors: Companies like PayPal, Square, or international competitors.
Enterprise Software Companies: Companies like Salesforce, ServiceTitan, or others serving enterprise customers.
Larger KYB/Compliance Companies: Jumio or Veriff might acquire Duna as a way to strengthen their positioning.

An acquisition is probably more likely than Duna becoming an independent public company, though the latter is not impossible.

Conclusion: The Significance of Duna's Funding and Broader Trends

Duna's €30 million Series A funding round is significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that the business identity verification market remains attractive to investors and that there's believed to be room for new entrants to compete with established players like Jumio and Veriff. Second, it shows the power of founder pedigree and network—Duna's Stripe connection was clearly a significant factor in the company's ability to attract top-tier investors and strategic angels.

Third, Duna's approach—building ground-truth data rather than aggregating existing data sources, and pursuing a vision of network effects and reusable identity infrastructure—represents a genuine innovation in how the KYB market operates. If successful, Duna could establish a new standard for how business identity verification is done.

Fourth, Duna's success (to the extent it achieves success) will be studied as part of the broader "Stripe mafia" phenomenon. The fact that Stripe has produced multiple successful founders and that these founders continue to have access to networks, capital, and credibility after leaving the company suggests that successful startups can create positive feedback loops in their ecosystems.

For potential customers of KYB solutions, Duna represents a promising new option that offers a different approach to an important problem. For investors interested in fintech infrastructure, Duna represents a bet on the importance of identity infrastructure and the potential for network effects in business verification.

The next critical milestones for Duna will be: demonstrating continued revenue growth and customer acquisition, successfully expanding into new geographies and verticals, and most importantly, demonstrating that network effects around business identity verification are achievable and valuable. If the company achieves these milestones, it could become one of the most important infrastructure companies in the fintech ecosystem. If it doesn't, it will still likely be a successful business—there's strong underlying demand for good KYB solutions—but it won't achieve its broader vision.

For entrepreneurs and investors interested in fintech infrastructure and identity verification, Duna's funding round and approach warrant careful attention.

FAQ

What does KYB (Know Your Business) mean?

KYB stands for Know Your Business, a set of processes and procedures that financial institutions, fintech companies, and other regulated entities use to verify the identity and legitimacy of business customers. Unlike KYC (Know Your Customer), which focuses on individual customers, KYB specifically addresses the verification of business entities, including verification of ownership structures, beneficial owners, and business legitimacy. This process is essential for AML (Anti-Money Laundering) compliance and fraud prevention.

How does Duna's business identity verification work differently from competitors?

Duna generates its own ground-truth business identity data by connecting directly to authoritative sources like government business registries and beneficial ownership registries, rather than aggregating data from existing third-party sources as competitors like Jumio and Veriff do. This approach provides higher data quality and consistency, and it enables Duna to build network effects where businesses can reuse verified identity information across multiple platforms, rather than undergoing duplicate verification with each platform.

What are the benefits of Duna's approach to business verification?

Duna's approach offers several benefits: faster onboarding for businesses who have already been verified on other platforms using Duna, lower costs for enterprise customers by reducing manual review work, improved data quality and consistency across platforms, and the potential for significant network effects as more platforms adopt Duna. These benefits reduce the time and cost associated with business onboarding and increase the likelihood that business customers complete the onboarding process without abandoning it due to friction.

Who are Duna's founders and what is their background?

Duna was co-founded by Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber, both former employees of Stripe. Their experience at Stripe, where they likely worked on business onboarding and verification challenges at scale, provided them with deep insight into the problems that Duna is solving. This Stripe background was a significant factor in attracting top-tier investors and strategic angels to the company.

What is a "Stripe mafia" and why is it significant?

The "Stripe mafia" refers to the network of successful entrepreneurs and companies that have been founded by former Stripe employees. Stripe has become one of the most prolific "founder factories" in the fintech ecosystem, with alumni going on to found companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Duna. This phenomenon is significant because it demonstrates how successful companies can create positive feedback loops by developing talented founders who go on to build new successful companies.

What market opportunity is Duna addressing?

Duna addresses the business identity verification market, which is growing due to increasingly stringent regulatory requirements around AML compliance, beneficial ownership transparency, and KYB standards. The market includes demand from fintech companies, financial institutions, and increasingly, traditional enterprise SaaS companies that need to verify business customers. The current market is fragmented and expensive, with significant manual work required, creating an opportunity for a better, more efficient solution like Duna.

What does it mean that major competitors like Adyen are backing Duna?

The fact that Adyen's executives are backing Duna as angels suggests that even companies that could theoretically compete with Duna believe it makes more sense to support a neutral, specialized business identity verification platform than to compete with it. This reflects Duna's positioning as neutral infrastructure that works with all platforms, regardless of whether they compete with each other, and validates the company's vision of becoming foundational infrastructure for business identity verification.

What is Duna's vision for the long term?

Duna's long-term vision is to build a global trust infrastructure with a digital passport for every business, allowing businesses to reuse their verified identity information across multiple platforms. This would create network effects where the value of the platform increases with each additional participant, and would fundamentally change how business onboarding works by allowing businesses to verify once and reuse that verification across multiple platforms, similar to how consumers can use identity credentials across different services.

How does Duna plan to scale from European focus to global?

Rather than trying to achieve global scale all at once, Duna is focusing on identifying and capturing "patches of networks"—clusters of companies that already have overlapping relationships. Examples include manufacturing supply chains in specific regions, investment firms with overlapping LPs, and financial systems in specific countries like the Netherlands. Success in these patches can provide proof of concept and momentum for expansion to other patches, while generating revenue in the near term.

What are the risks to Duna's business model?

Key risks include the high cost of building and maintaining ground-truth data across jurisdictions, the complexity of expanding globally given jurisdiction-specific requirements, potential competitive responses from larger competitors, and the question of whether network effects around business identity verification can actually be achieved and monetized. Additionally, regulatory changes could affect the viability of certain aspects of the business model.

What alternatives to Duna exist for business identity verification?

For teams seeking comprehensive identity verification solutions, established alternatives include Jumio and Veriff, both of which have built substantial businesses providing KYB and KYC solutions. For teams looking for AI-powered business automation and workflow solutions, platforms like Runable offer capabilities for automating identity verification workflows and document generation for compliance purposes at significantly lower cost ($9/month starting price). Other alternatives include specialized compliance platforms and in-house systems built by large enterprises. The choice among alternatives depends on specific requirements around data quality, network effects, cost, and integration capabilities.

How Runable Complements Business Identity Infrastructure

While Duna focuses specifically on business identity verification data and infrastructure, teams implementing KYB processes often need broader automation and workflow solutions. Runable's AI-powered automation platform can help teams automate the document generation, reporting, and process management aspects of KYB workflows. For example, teams can use Runable to automatically generate compliance reports, create identity verification documentation templates, and automate workflows around business onboarding—complementing specialized KYB providers like Duna.

For developers and teams building modern identity infrastructure or implementing KYB processes, considering how specialized KYB providers like Duna can work alongside broader automation platforms can lead to more efficient, cost-effective solutions than building everything in-house.

Key Takeaways

Duna raised €30M Series A led by CapitalG, becoming best-funded European Stripe alumni startup
Company's ground-truth data approach differs from competitors like Jumio and Veriff who aggregate existing sources
Founders have deep earned insight from Stripe experience with business onboarding at scale
Stripe and Adyen executives backing the company validates the neutral infrastructure positioning
Patches-of-networks strategy allows network effects to materialize at smaller scales before global expansion
KYB market growing due to tightening AML regulations and beneficial ownership transparency requirements
Duna's vision of reusable business identity credentials creates potential for significant network effects
Competition from Jumio and Veriff presents challenges but Duna's differentiation provides defensibility
Series A funding provides runway for expensive data generation and geographic expansion
Stripe mafia phenomenon demonstrates how successful companies can create positive ecosystem feedback loops