‘One-click’ KYB startup Duna picks up investment from Alphabet growth fund

European business identity startup Duna has completed a 30 million euros (US$35.4 million) series A funding round led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG.

The startup offers onboarding, including identity document and biometric verification, Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB) and Anti Money Laundering (AML), which is paired with AI tools that help perform business verification by scanning documents, screening against sanctions lists and preventing fraud.

The financing brings the firm’s total funding to more than 40 million euros ($47.3 million). Duna raised a 10.7 million euros ($12.1 million) seed round in May last year, led by Index Ventures.

European venture capital firms also participated in the latest round, alongside Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake Chairman Frank Slootman.

The fresh investment represents one of the larger single raises in the European digital identity space during the past year, which also saw funding rounds for OneID and Yaspa, according to EU-startups.

Founded by two former employees at payment company Stripe, Duna’s vision is to create a shareable business identity similar to a digital passport for companies, that will evolve into a network for shareable identity and one-click onboarding.

According to Duna’s founder, Duco van Lanschot, the firm has seen strong traction with enterprise customers. Co-founded in 2023 with David Schreiber, it currently serves financial companies, including fintechs Plaid and Moss, payment solutions provider CCV, online retailer Bol and SVEA bank.

The new funding will be used towards further expansion of Duna’s enterprise capabilities and doubling down on R&D.

“Compliance and identity now consume up to 10-20 percent of a bank’s total costs,” Van Lanschot says in a release. “The expensive and manual legacy systems lead to billions lost in fraud, friction, and fines, as well as lost income from refusals of legitimate customers. This makes it an ideal use case for AI automation.”​

CapitalG explains its investment into Duna

CapitalG has previously invested in companies such as Stripe, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Duolingo and Oodo. In a note published on its website, the investment firm explains that funding Duna was motivated by the manual and costly process of exchanging information and documents between businesses.

Unlike verifying people, who have relatively stable identities tied to government-issued documents and biometrics, verifying legal entities is more complex. Businesses evolve, restructure and transact across multiple jurisdictions. In addition, there is no globally standardized “company database” to rely on.

This is why the challenge of business onboarding and identity verification remains relatively unsolved by software today, says Alex Nichols, CapitalG general partner.

“Historical attempts have tried to solve this as a data integration problem – orchestrating business logic across various data sources,” he writes. “Unfortunately, the success of this is limited by the quality of that data.”

To improve low data quality, it is critical to address its root cause, he adds.

Duna plans to command the identity process end-to-end, from customer intake and communication to policy engine, data platform for aggregating insights across systems and analyst workflow tooling.

“Because of this end-to-end approach, Duna can most effectively decrease friction and increase conversion rates,” says Nichols. For example, rather than standard forms, Duna will only ask users for the incremental required data not already in its network. Customers report 35 percent plus conversion increases and 90 percent plus reductions in time to onboard.”

The ultimate goal for Duna is to build an identity network –  a shared, real-time infrastructure layer that creates value for each participant in the transaction.

“Each business onboarded improves the network’s conversion advantage, enabling customers to further cut onboarding through ‘one-click’ log-in. Over time, a shared identity network will also enable businesses to learn from the review process of others and benefit from system-wide risk signals,” Nichols explains.

Article Topics

AML  |  digital identity  |  funding  |  identity verification  |  KYB  |  KYC