Duna, a fast-rising compliance tech startup founded by ex-Stripe executives Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber, has secured €10.7 million in seed funding to reimagine how businesses verify their identity. Backed by Index Ventures and a slate of high-profile angels including Adyen’s Pieter van der Does and former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, Duna aims to eliminate the pain and delays in Know Your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes through AI-powered automation.
With this funding, Duna plans to strengthen its foothold across Europe while laying the groundwork for global expansion. The startup’s core mission is bold: to build a reusable “digital passport” for businesses—so they can prove their identity instantly, securely, and without manual friction.
Fixing Identity’s “Last Mile”
The idea behind Duna was born out of frustration. During their years at Stripe, Schreiber and Van Lanschot saw firsthand how slow, manual identity checks clogged onboarding and compliance in regulated sectors. Even sending money abroad could involve a maze of back-and-forths, lost time, and inconsistent documentation. These experiences exposed the broken state of business identity infrastructure—a legacy burden that still fuels fraud, fines, and operational drag.
Van Lanschot recalls needing 16 interactions just to verify a payment. That inefficiency sparked a new vision: compliance tools that actually empower growth instead of slowing it down. “We’re building the future of digital trust for businesses,” says Schreiber. “If we can draft contracts using AI, why are we still faxing documents to prove identity?”
From Stripe to Building a Digital Identity Network
Founded in 2023 and operating between Germany and the Netherlands, Duna brings together top engineering talent from Stripe, Adyen, Airbnb, and Spotify. Their mission? Make compliance seamless through intelligent automation and reusable credentials.
Instead of clunky document uploads and slow approvals, Duna’s API-first platform uses AI to handle data collection, liveness checks, and biometric verification—reducing onboarding times from days to just a few hours. One enterprise client reported cutting their customer verification window from eight days to two hours.
But Duna isn’t just about speed—it’s about creating a shared infrastructure for trust. Much like Stripe transformed payments, Duna envisions a system where once a business verifies itself, that credential can be reused across other services—from banks to marketplaces—without repeating the process.
Why VCs and Operators Are Betting Big
The €50 billion identity verification market is ripe for change, and Index Ventures partner Jan Hammer—who also backed Adyen and Wise—believes Duna is well positioned to lead that shift. He cites the strength of the team and the clarity of their product vision as key reasons behind their investment.
Pieter van der Does, who now advises Duna, draws a parallel to his own journey with Adyen. “They’re solving the same kind of deep complexity we faced when building global payments infrastructure.”
Duna’s adaptability is also winning over clients. Instead of offering a rigid solution, the platform allows for deep customization, supporting compliance standards like AMLD5, PSD2, and DAC7. Clients like Plaid and Sequra have seen significant onboarding conversion boosts since integrating Duna’s tools.
Rethinking Compliance as a Growth Lever
In today’s fast-moving AI world, where we generate images without cameras and write code without coding, business identity is still stuck in the past. Duna wants to change that. By treating identity verification as a network problem—and compliance as a product rather than a barrier—the startup is building foundational infrastructure for a more trusted digital economy.
Their goal? Turn KYB from a bureaucratic headache into a business accelerator. And with fresh funding, a killer team, and a clear product-market fit, Duna is well on its way to doing just that.
