Duna, a startup for business identity checks launched by former Stripe employees, has raised a €30 million in Series A. The funding makes it one of the best-funded fintech start-ups to emerge in Europe from Stripe’s alumni network.
The round was led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund and a longtime Stripe investor. Stripe also contributed several senior leaders, as well as executives from the payments company Adyen that were joining as angel investors.
Duna is based in Germany and the Netherlands, founded by Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. The firm helps fintech companies onboard business customers more quickly and with fewer drop offs during the process. Its clients include Plaid.
Stripe also does not use the service from Duna, which is led by a group of former Stripe executives, but former Stripe leaders backed the company after realizing how big a problem it was trying to solve. And executives from Adyen invested, despite working in the same general payments area.
Duna targets smaller and mid-sized businesses without big compliance departments. Its longer-term goal is to allow companies to re-use verified business information across multiple platforms, which will reduce duplicate checks and delays.
The decision to invest in Duna was driven by the company’s “entrepreneur DNA,” according to CapitalG partner Alex Nichols, with a special mention for having built its own data rather than cobbled it together from disparate public sources. Index Ventures, Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman – also participated in the round.
Duna competes with other providers of business verification, but claims that its method enables clients to onboard more quickly and cheaply. It’s now focusing on networks of businesses that already share partners or customers, where any verified can bring instant value.
The startup thinks that automation can eat into these heavy compliance workloads even before it is at a large scale. In time, Duna wants to make business onboarding as easy as a single click, making what is currently a familiar payments-like experience into the B2B world.
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