Stripe alumni raise €30 million in Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen executives | TechCrunch

Anthropic and OpenAI can be rivalsbut their presidents Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman have one thing in common: they are both Stripe alumni. With former employees who went on to create dozens of startups, fintech has become one of the most prolific »founding factories” – and the money follows. Latest example: corporate 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 CapitalGwhich has also supported Stripe since co-leads its Series D in 2016.

Headquartered in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was co-founded by Stripe alumni Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. With clients including Plaidthe startup helps fintech companies onboard business customers more effectively, reducing the typical churn associated with corporate identity checks and other fraud prevention measures.

Stripe is not a client of Duna, van Lanschot said, but its executives were well-positioned to understand the opportunity the startup was seizing, which is reflected in its capitalization table. The company’s angel investors include current Stripe 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.

Their support also confirms van Lanschot’s intuition that these companies would not compete with Duna, even if they could. “It requires such fine-grained controls that change company by company, that an Adyen or a Stripe is not going to turn their business into a separate product where another customer company can change all the configurations,” he told TechCrunch.

The reason it’s still worth it for Duna is because the startup is tackling a long queue of enterprise customers who don’t have huge resources to devote to enterprise onboarding. But it’s also because its vision doesn’t stop there: Duna’s ambition is to build a network allowing 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 to every company, so you can reuse your file right from the onboarding. [German spend management platform] Moss on board with Plaid, or you can reuse it to open a bank account,” van Lanschot said.

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 effects, or a more formal scale advantage,” he told TechCrunch. “I also love when founders get earned insight into a problem they might not otherwise know about, and this is a great example of that,” he added.

Duna has competitors in the category known as KYB, or Know Your Business. This includes providers such as Jumio and Veriff. But for Nichols, what sets Duna apart is its decision to generate its own data, rather than trying to pull together existing data sources that are often lacking. “This is a rare opportunity to rebuild something as fundamental as a visa and create an extraordinary business in the process.”

Duna says it has already found a strong business case in helping its clients onboard business users faster and at lower cost. This also explains why existing investors are doubling down: Index Ventures, which led Duna’s €10.7 million fundraising round in May 2025, participated in the Series A, as did Frank Slootman, president of Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake. But the startup’s bigger ambitions won’t bear fruit until Duna reaches significant size. The company is therefore looking for shortcuts.

How so? Van Lanschot and the Duna team identify small groups of companies that already overlap – what they call “network patches”. These include manufacturing companies with common customers, investment companies with overlapping LPs, or companies located in the same small country. In these tight-knit groups, the ability to reuse verification immediately becomes valuable, even before Duna hits any network effects.

The countries may be small, but the opportunities are big, van Lanschot said. “In the Netherlands alone – a very small country – the four biggest banks employ 14,000 people, and half of them work in companies. » Duna won’t completely replace these jobs yet, but AI automation can reduce costs and generate revenue even before network effects are felt.

If Duna ends up providing the rails for an identity network, there could be an even greater opportunity to leverage this position to enable enterprise onboarding with a single click. This would bring it closer to Amazon’s one-click checkout – or closer to B2B, Stripe Link. Once again with Duna, the Stripe connection is never far away.

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