The pitch sounds simple enough: What if verifying a business identity could work like scanning a passport at airport security—quick, standardized, trusted?
That's the bet behind Duna, an Amsterdam and Berlin startup that just closed a €30 million Series A led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund. The February 5 funding brings total capital raised to north of €40 million for a company barely three years old. Not bad for a venture tackling one of finance's most tedious problems—the thicket of know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks that can turn onboarding a new client into a weeks-long ordeal.
What makes Duna's trajectory particularly striking is the firepower backing it. This isn't some scrappy team cobbling together a compliance tool in their spare time. Co-founders Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber both spent formative years at Stripe—van Lanschot running the Benelux and DACH regions, Schreiber leading product initiatives. Their investor and advisor roster reads like a who's who of fintech royalty: Claire Hughes Johnson and David Singleton, Stripe's former COO and CTO, respectively. Frank Slootman, Snowflake's chairman, came back for a second round. Adyen founder Pieter van der Does wrote a check, as did current Adyen executives Mariëtte Swart and Ethan Tandowsky.
Either the founders are exceptionally well-connected, or there's something genuinely compelling about what they're building. Possibly both.
The Compliance Headache No One Wants
Here's the backdrop: Financial institutions typically dedicate 10 to 15 percent of their workforce to compliance functions, according to CapitalG's investment thesis. That's not a rounding error. For a bank with 1,000 employees, we're talking about 100 to 150 people doing little else but verifying identities, checking sanctions lists, and documenting it all for regulators.
Duna's platform promises to automate much of that grind. The company describes its product as "AI-native," though what that means in practice is more straightforward than the buzzword suggests: automated document parsing, registry lookups across 210 data sources in seven languages, case management workflows. Over 20 distinct modules handle everything from beneficial ownership verification to ongoing monitoring—the kind of lifecycle compliance that doesn't end once a customer signs up.
Customers include Plaid, the fintech infrastructure giant, along with Moss, CCV (a Fiserv subsidiary), Sweden's SVEA bank, and Brand New Day Bank in the Netherlands. Zak Lambert, Plaid's EMEA general manager, offered a rare bit of sales-speak enthusiasm, calling Duna's system something that "turned onboarding into a revenue driver." Translation: faster approvals mean more customers converting, fewer drop-offs during the sign-up gauntlet.
The company reports some eye-catching metrics—onboarding speeds up to 10.6 times faster, productivity gains around 4.8 times, conversion lifts of 37 percent within six months for certain clients. Those numbers, if they hold across a broader customer base, would explain why CapitalG's Alex Nichols led the round. Growth investors don't typically get excited about compliance software unless the unit economics are unusually attractive.
Regulatory Winds at Their Back
Timing matters. Europe is tightening the screws on business verification just as Duna scales up. The Digital Services Act, the 2024 EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, and the upcoming eIDAS 2.0 digital identity framework all nudge financial platforms toward more rigorous, auditable verification processes. That's the kind of regulatory tailwind startups dream about—mandates that essentially create demand for your product.
CapitalG's thesis frames Duna as constructing a "business identity network," which sounds grandiose but isn't entirely marketing fluff. The vision appears to be something like a credit bureau for corporate identity: verify once, use everywhere. One-click business onboarding across multiple platforms, assuming Duna can convince enough institutions to plug into its infrastructure.
Whether that network effect materializes remains an open question. Financial institutions aren't known for rushing into shared infrastructure, particularly when it touches compliance. But the founder pedigree and early customer traction suggest at least some appetite for a centralized approach.
The Stripe Alumni Network Strikes Again
Van Lanschot and Schreiber also clocked time at Trade Republic, Fourthline, and McKinsey before founding Duna in 2023. That's a resume combination—consulting, fintech, regulatory tech—that maps neatly onto the problem they're solving.
Their seed round in May 2025, a €10.7 million raise led by Index Ventures, already featured an improbable roster. Alexandre Prot from Qonto, Akshay Kothari of Notion, Stephanie Cohen (former chief strategy officer at Goldman Sachs), Hanno Renner of Personio, and Matt Briers, Wise's former CFO. Michael Cocoman, who served as Stripe's global chief compliance officer, backed them too.
At some point, the sheer concentration of heavyweight backers stops being coincidence and starts looking like validation. Then again, pedigree and capital don't guarantee execution. The fintech graveyard is littered with well-funded startups that solved problems elegantly in theory but struggled with messy real-world implementation.
Duna's next test: proving it can scale that "digital passport" vision beyond a dozen early adopters and into the hundreds of financial institutions that might actually need it. The capital is there. The regulatory environment is cooperating. Now comes the hard part—delivering on the pitch.
