Duna, a startup founded by two Stripe alumni and based in Germany and the Netherlands, has raised a €10.7m seed round to build tools that simplify identity verification processes for businesses.
The all-equity round was led by global VC Index Ventures and included participation from German VC Puzzle Ventures. It was also backed by a large number of high-profile business angels including Qonto cofounder Alexandre Prot, Alan cofounder Jean-Charles Samuelian, Pigment cofounder Eléonore Crespo and Anthropic exec Guillaume Princen.
The startup was launched in 2023 by Duco Van Lanschot, who was previously head of Benelux and DACH at Stripe for three years, and David Schreiber, who also spent six years at Stripe leading product teams.
KYC and KYB
Know your customer (KYC) and know your business (KYB) consist of verifying the identity of individual customers and business customers to prevent money-laundering, fraud and other financial crimes. They are mandatory processes for some companies in regulated spaces like finance and insurance. Marketplaces, which handle users’ funds, also have to comply.
These procedures are slow and error-prone, requiring to check and authenticate a wide range of personal information and business documents, sometimes across borders – as well as to keep monitoring users through time. They are still largely carried out manually by dedicated teams.
“Financial technology companies, banks, investment companies, commercial real estate companies – they are spending an insane amount of resources to work on this topic, which is mission-critical but non-core,” Van Lanschot tells Sifted.
It also means potential revenues are lost, he adds, as long onboarding times put off customers. “I sent dollars to the US with Duna, and it took me 16 back-and-forths to get checked and go through KYB,” says Van Lanschot.
Duna’s platform
Duna says that it is building software focusing on business identification, which automates the process and lets companies onboard enterprise customers more easily. One company, says Van Lanschot, saw its onboarding time for a customer drop from eight days to two hours when it used the platform.
The startup already has a team of nearly 20 and is working with several customers including US fintech Plaid, Spanish payments platform SeQura and Dutch bank Brand New Day. Its business model is based on both subscriptions and variable fees.
The next step, it says, will be to create a global network of “shareable identities” in which businesses would have a digital passport, enabling them to be identified immediately across different platforms.
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