Anthropic and OpenAI can be opponentsbut their presidents Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman have one thing in common: they’re both Stripe graduates. With former employees who have gone on to create dozens of startups, the fintech firm has become one of the most prolific “founding factories” — and the money follows. The latest example: business identity verification startup Duna, which just raised a €30 million Series A to become the best-funded European member of the so-called “Stripe mafia”. The funding round was led by Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG, which has also backed Stripe since it led its Series D in 2016.
Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was co-founded by Stripe alumni Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. With clients included Plaidthe startup helps fintech companies onboard business customers more efficiently by reducing the typical churn associated with corporate identity checks and other fraud prevention measures.
Stripe is not a customer of Duna, van Lanschot said, but its executives were able to understand the startup’s opportunity, which is reflected in its capital table. The company’s angel investors include former Stripe executives David Singleton (CTO), Claire Hughes Johnson (COO) and Michael Cocoman (Global Chief Compliance Officer). Even Stripe rival Adyen got involved, with CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky joining as angels.
Their approvals also validate van Lanschot’s view that these companies will not compete with Duna, even though they could. “There needs to be such fine-grained controls that change by company so that an Adyen or a Stripe isn’t going to roll out their business as a separate product where another enterprise customer can change all the configurations,” he told TechCrunch.
If it’s still worthwhile for Duna, it’s because the startup is chasing the long tail of enterprise customers who don’t have massive resources to devote to business setup. But it’s also because her vision doesn’t stop there: Duna’s ambition is to create a network that allows companies 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. So you can reuse your file from onboarding to [German spend management platform] Moss to board Plaid or you can use it again to open a bank account,” said van Lanschot.
That goal resonated with Alex Nichols, the general partner who led CapitalG’s Series A investment. “I would say the common thing I look for in my investments is some sort of network effect or more formal scale advantage,” he told TechCrunch. “I also love it when founders have a winning insight into a problem that they might not know about otherwise, and this is a really good example of that,” he added.
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Duna has competitors 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 create its own data, rather than trying to gather existing data sources that are often lacking. “It’s the rare opportunity to rebuild something as fundamental as a Visa and build an amazing business in the process.”
Duna says it has already made a strong business case for helping customers onboard enterprise users faster and cheaper. That also explains why existing investors are doubling down: Index Ventures, which led Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025, he participated in Series A, as did Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake president Frank Slootman. But the startup’s larger ambition won’t pay off until Duna reaches significant scale. So the company looks for shortcuts.
How so? Van Lanschot and the Duna team identify small groups of companies that already overlap with each other – what they call “network patches”. These include construction companies with common clients, investment companies with overlapping LPs, or companies in the same small country. In these tight-knit groups, the ability to reuse verification becomes valuable immediately, even before Duna achieves full network effect.
The countries may be small, but the opportunity is big, van Lanschot said. “In the Netherlands alone – a small, tiny country – the four biggest banks employ 14,000 people according to compliance, and half of them work in business.” CapitalG later clarified that 13,000 people work on compliance across all Dutch banks. Either way, Duna won’t completely replace those jobs yet, but AI automation can save costs and generate revenue even before network effects kick in.
If Duna eventually provides the rails for an identity network, there may be an even greater opportunity to take advantage of this position to enable one-click business onboarding. This would make it similar to Amazon’s one-click checkout – or closer to B2B, with Stripe Link. Once again with Duna, the Stripe connection is never too far away.
This story has been updated to correct the name and title of one of Duna’s angel investors and to add a clarification about the number of people employed under Dutch compliance.
