Anthropic and OpenAI may be rivals, but 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, the fintech company has become one of the most prolific “founder factories” — and the money is following. The latest example: business 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 CapitalG, which has also backed Stripe since co-leading its Series D in 2016.
Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was cofounded by Stripe alumni Duco Van Lanschot and David Schreiber. With customers including Plaid, the startup helps fintech companies onboard business customers more efficiently, reducing the typical churn associated with corporate ID checks and other fraud prevention measures.
Stripe is not a customer of Duna, Van Lanschot said, but its executives were well placed to understand the opportunity that the startup is seizing, which is reflected in its cap 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 rival Adyen got involved, with CRCO Mariëtte Swart and CFO Ethan Tandowsky joining as angels.
Their endorsements also validate Van Lanschot’s hunch that these companies won’t compete with Duna, even though they could. “It requires such fine-grained controls that change on a company-by-company basis, that an Adyen or a Stripe isn’t going to spin out their business onboarding as a separate product where another enterprise customer can change all of the configurations,” he told TechCrunch.
If it’s still worth the effort for Duna, it’s because the startup is going after the long tail of enterprise clients that don’t have huge resources to dedicate to business onboarding. But it’s also because its vision doesn’t stop there: Duna’s ambition is to build a network that allows 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 for every business. So you can reuse your file from onboarding on [German spend management platform] Moss to onboard with Plaid, or you can reuse it to open up a bank account,” Van Lanschot said.
This goal resonated with Alex Nichols, the general partner who led CapitalG’s investment into the Series A. “I would say the common thing I look for in my investments are some sort of network effects, or more formal scale advantage,” he told TechCrunch. “I also love it when founders have an earned insight about a problem they may not known about otherwise, and this is a very good example of that,” he added.
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