In an era of accelerating digital transformation, Duna, co-founded by former Stripe executives David Schreiber and Duco Van Lanschot, has secured €10.7 million in seed funding to revolutionise business identity verification and compliance.
Led by Index Ventures, with participation from Puzzle Ventures and a stellar group of angel investors, this investment validates Duna’s vision to eliminate inefficiencies in Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) processes. The funding will enable Duna to expand its platform capabilities and scale across Europe and beyond.
The seed funding will power Duna’s AI capabilities and market expansion. While the company’s immediate focus is strengthening its European presence, its vision is global. Adyen co-founder Pieter van der Does, now an advisor, sees parallels with his own company’s journey: “Duna is solving complexity akin to what motivated us at Adyen’s inception.”
Index Ventures’ leadership in the round signals strong confidence in Duna’s potential to transform the €50 billion identity verification market. Partner Jan Hammer, known for backing Adyen and Wise, emphasises the team’s strengths: “Duna has an exceptional team poised to redefine an industry long overdue for change.” The impressive investor roster includes Adyen co-founder Pieter van der Does, former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, and ex-Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson.
The founding vision: From Stripe to solving identity’s “last mile”
Founded in 2023 by Stripe alumni Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber, Duna operates from Germany and the Netherlands. Van Lanschot led Stripe’s Benelux and DACH regions for three years, while Schreiber spent six years leading product teams.
“Identity remains one of the internet’s largest unsolved problems,” says Duco van Lanschot, Duna’s founder. “In 1993, The New Yorker published an iconic cartoon featuring two dogs. One sits in front of a computer, saying to the other: ‘Nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet.’ Little has changed since then. Identity remains tied to legacy systems, resulting in billions lost to fraud, friction, and fines. We built Duna to fix that.”
During their combined decade at Stripe, leading product and regional operations, Schreiber and Van Lanschot identified a critical gap in business identity infrastructure. They witnessed firsthand how manual, error-prone verification processes created bottlenecks, especially in regulated sectors like finance and insurance.
Van Lanschot shares a personal frustration: “I sent dollars to the U.S. with Duna, and it took me 16 back-and-forths to get checked and go through KYB.” This experience inspired Duna’s mission to create a seamless, automated solution transforming compliance from a cost centre into a competitive advantage.
A team of engineers and product leaders from Adyen, Airbnb, and Spotify enhances the founders’ Stripe experience. They bring deep expertise in building scalable, user-centric platforms. Their collective experience shapes Duna’s core philosophy: compliance should enhance, not hinder, business growth.
“In a fast-moving AI landscape, we generate flawless images without a camera and draft legal arguments without a day in law school. Yet when it comes to business identity, we’re still stuck in the era of spreadsheets. Duna helps businesses drive historically paper-heavy compliance analysis without requiring manual work”, said David Schreiber, Duna’s founder. “We’re building a future where businesses do have digital passports – so businesses can identify themselves instantly, securely, and universally.”
The technology: automating compliance, building a networked future
Duna’s platform tackles three critical challenges in business identity verification: automation at scale, shareable identity networks, and customisation for regulated industries.
Traditional KYC/KYB workflows rely on manual document checks, causing delays and errors. Duna’s API-driven platform automates data collection, verification, and continuous monitoring, cutting onboarding times from days to hours. One enterprise client reduced customer onboarding from eight days to two hours using Duna’s tools. The platform minimises human intervention through AI-powered document analysis, liveness checks, and biometric authentication while maintaining regulatory compliance.
“Business onboarding used to be a cost centre for Plaid. Now, it’s a revenue driver thanks to Duna’s intuitive onboarding flows, compliance automation, and high-end UX”, said Zak Lambert, Plaid’s VP EMEA.
Adyen co-founder and CEO Pieter van der Does is an official advisor to the company. He said, “There are many similarities between the level of complexity Duna set out to solve and what motivated us when starting Adyen.”
Duna’s vision extends beyond verification to creating a global identity network where businesses maintain a reusable “digital passport.” This innovation enables companies to share pre-verified credentials across platforms, eliminating redundant checks. Picture a business completing KYB once with a bank and using those same credentials instantly to onboard with a payment processor or marketplace, similar to Stripe’s payment infrastructure but applied to identity.
Unlike one-size-fits-all competitors such as Veriff or Socure, Duna customises its platform for enterprises navigating complex compliance requirements, including AMLD5/6, PSD2/3, and DAC7. Clients like Plaid and Sequra use Duna’s configurable workflows to balance regulatory compliance with user experience, achieving a 38% increase in onboarding conversion rates within six months.
As regulations tighten and digital interactions grow, Duna’s unified identity network could become essential infrastructure for the global economy. By transforming compliance into a strategic asset, Duna redefines how businesses establish trust in the digital age.
