Insight
4 min read
Van Lanschot and Schreiber met at Stripe. Van Lanschot led the Benelux and DACH region there for three years; Schreiber ran the largest global business unit for six years, including the core payments platform. Leadership roles at Trade Republic Bank and identity company Fourthline followed. They kept encountering the same pattern: compliance is not a side matter, it is infrastructure that deserves its own foundation.
In 2023 they founded Duna, based in Amsterdam. The platform helps large banks, fintechs and platforms verify business customers through identity checks, company verification and ongoing anti-money-laundering and sanctions screening, all within a single system. Customers report onboarding that is 10.6 times faster and a 4.8 times productivity gain. Within six months of implementation, enterprise customers saw onboarding conversion rates rise by an average of 38 percent [1].
"Compliance and identity now cost banks 10 to 20 percent of their total expenses. Those costly, manual legacy systems lead to billions in losses from fraud, friction and fines. That makes it an ideal application for AI automation."
The market problem is larger than it first appears. European banks and financial institutions now spend up to a fifth of their total operational costs on compliance, driven by an accumulation of regulation that has only grown more complex in recent years [2]. Meanwhile, the underlying processes have barely changed: requesting documents, manually verifying them, following up by email.
On top of that, AI is making the problem more acute, not easier. Deepfakes, synthetic business identities and automated fraud attempts are increasing in both speed and sophistication. The same tools that can automate compliance simultaneously enlarge the attack surface for fraud. That is the paradox behind Duna's timing: urgency is growing on both sides at once.
"In a fast-moving AI landscape, we generate flawless images without a camera and write legal arguments without a law degree. But when it comes to business identity, we are still in the spreadsheet era."
The ambition extends beyond a better compliance tool. Duna ultimately wants to build a network for shareable business identity: a digital passport that allows a company to verify itself once and then onboard instantly with any new business partner. One-click business identity, much as Stripe once achieved for payments.
The investor network as a reflection of the problem
The founders raised €10.7 million in May 2025 in a seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Puzzle Ventures and a notable group of tech executives [3]. Among the investors were Pieter van der Does (co-founder Adyen, also an advisor), Adriaan Mol (founder Mollie), Frank Slootman (former CEO Snowflake), Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO Stripe), Ethan Tandowsky (CFO Adyen) and Alexandre Prot (founder Qonto).
What stands out is how directly the investor base mirrors the domain. Pieter van der Does drew a direct comparison between Duna's challenge and the early days of Adyen. Adriaan Mol of Mollie is one of the best-known Dutch fintech entrepreneurs. Gloria Bauerlein of Puzzle Ventures, who came on board as an early believer, put it most directly:
"I invest just as much in an idea as in talent. I have known David and Duco for years, and the question was never whether they would start a defining company, but when."
In February 2026 a €30 million Series A followed, led by CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Alphabet. Index Ventures and Puzzle Ventures participated again. Total funding thereby exceeded €40 million [4]. CapitalG partner Alex Nichols called the founders "the perfect founders to solve business identity for the internet", citing in part their operator background and ability to build a high-ownership culture.
There is one detail in Duna's structure that falls outside the standard startup architecture: a third of the company is held by the Duna Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is legally embedded in the business. In a sector dominated by short-term venture capital pressure, that is a deliberate positioning, and a signal about the timeframe in which Van Lanschot and Schreiber intend to build.
Duna now serves major names including Plaid, Bol, Moss, CCV (Fiserv) and SVEA Bank. The new funding will go toward expanding enterprise capabilities, with an emphasis on auditable AI that meets the stringent requirements of banks and large institutions [4].
The central question is whether Duna can scale quickly enough to define the category before larger players enter the same space. Compliance software has high retention but also slow decision-making cycles. Banks do not replace their compliance infrastructure overnight. But European regulatory pressure is increasing, AI is making fraud more complex, and the fintech generation of the past decade needs a professional compliance foundation.
Duna positions itself precisely at that intersection: not as an additional layer on top of existing systems, but as the infrastructure on which the next generation of trusted business relationships will be built.
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