Duna: reimagining business identity for an AI-first world
Doing your taxes. Talking to customer service. Opening a business bank account. Some things can’t be enjoyed, only endured – even when that means 42 days of back-and-forth emails, and 42 rounds of document submissions.
But maybe verifying and onboarding businesses doesn’t have to be so painful. Rigorous fraud checks and compliance with Know Your Business (KYB) regulations are crucial in financial services. But couldn’t the whole thing be smoother, even delightful for the customer? Could you one day have a portable business identity that’s as easy to show as a passport? And could identity checks be a competitive advantage, even a conversion engine?
That’s the vision behind Duna, the latest company to join the Index family with €10.7m in funding. The founders, Duco and David, have been working with us in stealth for the past year, though we’ve known them for much longer than that.
David first caught our attention during his time at Stripe and Trade Republic in Berlin, where his meticulous approach to product stood out. A master Lego builder who also loves board games, David thinks a mile deep, and obsesses about every single detail in what he creates.
Meanwhile, we kept bumping into Duco in Amsterdam through mutual friends and at Index dinners. We were impressed by his dynamism and tenacity – on display, not least of all, in his dedication to ultramarathons. (Duco set a record for the fastest Dutch finisher in the Marathon des Sables, where he completed six marathons in seven days across the Sahara Desert.)
When we heard Duco and David might be raising, we jumped on planes to Amsterdam and Berlin respectively; after a three-hour conversation, we knew this was a team Index had to back.
David and Duco met at Stripe, where David was assigned as Duco’s buddy to get him up to speed. They soon teamed up to grow Stripe across Europe, with Duco winning deals while David worked on product.
It was obvious that they needed to do a startup together. Business identity and KYB was an attractive target – neglected and unsexy, it was a problem David and Duco knew intimately. KYB was also a $20 billion market opportunity that would only get bigger as more global businesses moved online, as they realized identity could drive revenues, and as AI agents increasingly took over responsibility for business transactions.
The company as a second product
Duna already has an exceptional team that comes from the likes of Adyen, Spotify and Stripe. That standout quality comes from the founders’ belief that, to succeed, you can’t just solve the right problem – you also need to build the right kind of organization. Duco and David see their company as a second product, to be designed with the same attentiveness as their software.
This has led Duna to crystallize some radical cultural principles. One is transparency: all Slack channels are open to everyone, and all Duna team members can see board minutes plus the full cap table. Everyone working there is an ‘owner’, not ‘employee’ – considered a leader and co-creator of a company that’s helping everyone to flourish and give their best.
Duna also has a unique ownership structure, in which a new foundation owns one third of the company from the outset. ‘We don't believe we first need to make billions of dollars and only then give money away,’ Duco says.
The craft of experience
What unites Duna’s culture and product vision is the idea that well-made experiences have compounding positive after-effects. But even as consumer products become slicker every day, it’s a common misperception that business customers are insensitive to friction.
The results of this mindset are disastrous. Half of all business bank clients abandon processes that take longer than ten minutes, and many fintechs lose 40-60% of potential customers during self-serve onboarding. When your customers have lifetime values in the tens of thousands of euros, even a small increase in customer conversion could result in millions of additional revenue. Why spend so much getting customers into your marketing funnel, only to give them an awful first experience that sets the tone for the whole relationship?
Duna’s solution is an end-to-end operating system that reimagines onboarding and identity from the ground up. Their platform combines elegant user interfaces that are completely customisable, with intelligent case management, analytics, automated reminders and simplified compliance procedures. Every element is crafted to enhance the experience and meet all the necessary compliance standards. The results are already evident: Duna makes onboarding ten times as fast for their customers, and increases conversion rates by almost a third.
Beyond onboarding, Duna’s longer-term gambit is to create a reusable business identity network – a system where companies can securely verify who they are, and then use it across multiple services. It’s akin to a digital passport for businesses. This becomes even more important in the dawning era of AI agents, who will need secure, standardized and automated ways of proving whom they work for.
We are thrilled to partner with David and Duco as they hone their craft of fashioning extraordinary experiences. Brick by brick, step by step, they’re poised to redefine an industry long overdue for a shake-up.
Published — May 6, 2025
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