In September 1958, Bank of America launched a quiet revolution by mailing 60,000 unsolicited  “BankAmericards” to residents in Fresno, California. Each carried a few hundred dollars of pre-approved credit that could be used in lieu of store charge accounts.

The idea of buying on credit wasn’t new. For decades, retailers had offered “one-to-one” charge accounts (and even single store credit cards) to loyal customers alongside lines of credit on large purchases. This forced retailers to act like banks: underwriting credit, taking risk, and managing collections. Retailers held more than 40% of all US consumer credit on their balance sheets.

The magic of BankAmericard (now Visa) was the portability of customer identity and credit across a broad range of merchants from a single onboarding / credit line (“one to many”). This shift brought consumers instant, frictionless payments and allowed merchants to shed expensive internal credit teams. Beyond in-person transactions, this network served as foundational infrastructure for B2C ecommerce.

Portable, cross-merchant customer credit (and, implicitly, identity) transformed how the B2C economy transacts. Despite most B2B relationship discovery today starting on the internet, why hasn't there been a rhyming infrastructure shift for business transactions?

Thirty years into the internet, a foundational infrastructure layer is still missing. Today business identity is stuck in the painful “one to one” paradigm. Most B2B relationships begin with a painful (and familiar) manual exchange of information and documents. The deadweight loss of businesses spending tens of billions of dollars on siloed labor repeatedly asking each other for the same information is staggering. Likewise, the opportunity to lift all boats by building the modern standard in business identity is massive. The downstream possibilities from reducing identity verification friction from weeks to “one click" are exciting to consider. 

We believe now is the right time to build this network for portable business identity. 

Business Onboarding + Identity Verification Is Manual & Costly Today

When a company initiates a new trust-reliant interfirm relationship -- think new customer, new supplier, new credit line, joining a marketplace as a seller, amongst many others -- they are subjected to lengthy manual questionnaires and a tedious, multi-week cycle of back-and-forths. This friction exists both due to regulatory requirements and self-protection. Regulated companies are obligated to verify their customers’ legitimacy, ownership structure, and operations to prevent financial crimes like money laundering. More generally, it’s critical to understand the creditworthiness of new customers and the trustworthiness of critical suppliers. The friction these checks create is not merely an inconvenience; it also drives significant revenue loss: Over 30% of business customers abandon the post-sale onboarding process.

The verification of a legal entity is fundamentally more complex than the verification of a person. Individuals have relatively stable identities tied to government-issued documents and biometrics. Businesses, conversely, are fluid, multi-layered constructs that evolve, restructure, and transact across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. The lack of a globally standardized "company database" exacerbates these challenges. The existing B2B data vendors and credit bureaus have data sets that are often stale, incomplete, and difficult to standardize. This complexity means that compliance headcount can account for up to 10-15% of total staff at financial institutions.

The challenge of business onboarding and identity verification remains relatively unsolved by software today. Historical attempts have tried to solve this as a data integration problem - orchestrating business logic across various data sources. Unfortunately, the success of this is limited by the quality of that data. Duna believes it is critical to address the root cause of why existing data sources remain low quality today.

AI & Regulatory Shifts are Growing the Opportunity

AI is amplifying fraud risk by making it easy to create convincing synthetic identities, overwhelming legacy verification systems built for static, document-based checks.

While exacerbating fraud, unlocks in AI are a major contributor to why this problem is solvable today. Duna can learn from situations where manual analyst work is required, both reusing the data across its network but, more importantly, learning the process through which the analyst found the answer. Both of these components are critical to achieving “one click” business identity.

Separately, over the past decade, Europe has tightened its approach to business identity verification as fraud has increased, creating a mandatory demand for high-fidelity, automated business verification. The EU Digital Services Act (2022, effective from 2024) requires platforms to verify and display trader information such as identity, registration, and VAT details, widening the scope of ‘regulated’ businesses beyond just financial services. The 2024 EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation set consistent due diligence standards across Europe. The 2024 European Digital Identity Wallet initiative, part of the EU’s  eIDAS 2.0 regulation, allows individuals and businesses to share verified credentials digitally, making cross-border reviews faster and more standardized. 

Duna: Building Portable Business Identity

Duna transforms onboarding from a cost center into a revenue driver. Duna owns the identity process end-to-end: customer-facing intake & communication, 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. For example, rather than standard forms, Duna will only ask users for the incremental  required data not already in its network. Customers report 35%+ conversion increases and 90%+ reductions in time to onboard.

Duna’s ultimate goal is to build the world’s standard 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.

Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber founded Duna in 2023. The pair met as fellow superstars (and onboarding buddies!) at Stripe, where Duco led the Benelux / DACH region, and David led product for the core card payment platform. They experienced this problem first hand at Stripe, where business onboarding emerged as one of the company’s key technical rate limiters. Aside from the obvious founder-market fit and superlative references, what stood out to us about the duo was the focus on thoughtfully defining and building Duna’s company culture “as a second product.” Talent density, high standards, transparency, and ownership are critical to moving quickly towards realizing Duna’s ambitious mission.

We’re thrilled to partner with Duco, David, and the rest of the Duna team as they pursue their bold vision of solving identity for the internet.