Tech
Stripe alumni raise €30M Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen execs
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 co-founded 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 know about otherwise, and this is a very good example of that,” he added.
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Duna has competitors in the category known as KYB, or Know Your Business. This includes vendors such as Jumio and Veriff. But for Nichols, what sets Duna apart is its decision to generate its own data, rather than trying to aggregate existing data sources that are often lacking. “It’s the rare opportunity to rebuild something as foundational as a Visa and create an amazing business in the process.”
Duna says it has already found a strong business case in helping customers onboard corporate users faster and cheaper. This also explains why existing investors are doubling down: Index Ventures, which led Duna’s €10.7 million seed round in May 2025, participated in the Series A, as did Puzzle Ventures and Snowflake chairman Frank Slootman. But the startup’s bigger ambition won’t pay off until Duna reaches significant scale. So the company is looking for shortcuts.
How so? Van Lanschot and the Duna team are identifying small clusters of companies that already overlap with each other — what they call “patches of networks.” These include manufacturing companies with shared customers, investment firms with overlapping LPs, or companies in the same small country. In these tight-knit groups, the ability to reuse verification becomes valuable immediately, even before Duna achieves full network effects.
The countries may be small, but the opportunity is big, van Lanschot said. “In the Netherlands alone — a tiny, tiny country — the four biggest banks employ 14,000 people in compliance, and half of them are working on businesses.” Duna won’t fully replace these jobs yet, but AI automation can save costs and generate revenue even before the network effects kick in.
If Duna eventually provides the rails for an identity network, there might be an even bigger opportunity in taking advantage of this position to enable one-click business onboarding. This would make it akin to Amazon’s one-click checkout — or closer to B2B, to Stripe Link. Once again with Duna, the Stripe connection is never really far.
Tech
SNAK Venture Partners raises $50M fund to back vertical marketplaces
SNAK Venture Partners announced Wednesday the close of its oversubscribed $50 million debut fund, anchored by the investment firm Pritzker Group (founded by Illinois governor JB Pritzker and his brother, Tony).
SNAK founders Sonia Nagar and Adam Koopersmith worked at the firm and helped lead investments in companies like the auto marketplace Backlot Cars and TicketsNow (exited to Ticketmaster). The duo decided to break out on their own and, earlier this year, launched their firm to back digital marketplaces.
“It felt like the timing was right and there was support within the firm to go do this,” Nagar said.
The vision is that there is still so much to digitize, like in supply chain and construction, and this is the moment to strike because even holdout industries are more comfortable adopting new technology as fintech architecture advances.
“If you look at the biggest venture wins over the last decade,” she said, pointing to the likes of Uber, Instacart, and Airbnb, “those are five of the top 10 outcomes in venture.” As in those companies that raised billions from investors, went on to IPO, and returned millions to them.
“Most of those wins were in consumer, which tends to be faster-moving than large enterprises,” Nagar continued. “We think there’s a ton of white space to double down and focus on B2B marketplaces.” Looking specifically for the categories that haven’t yet digitized.
The firm has already invested in six companies, including Big Rentals and Repackify, focused on equipment rental and packaging logistics, respectively. Nagar said the firm hopes to overall write seed checks into at least 20 companies, at $1 million to $2 million a pop. She said they hope to deploy the entire fund within the next 3 to 4 years.
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Though many new funds are struggling to raise capital (and capital remains concentrated at the top), Nagar said she and Koopersmith were able to lean on their backgrounds when wooing LPs.
Nagar previously helped launch Amazon apparel back in 2009, and was head of mobile at RetailMeNot. Koopersmith, meanwhile, spent 20 years at Pritzker Group and serves on the board of various marketplace companies. At the same time, Nagar said that without Pritzker’s support, it would have been quite hard to raise this fund, especially in last year’s environment.
Other LPs in their fund include the State of Illinois Growth and Innovation Fund and executives from other marketplace companies, like Favor Delivery and RetailMeNot.
Nagar said the firm is also location-agnostic, recognizing that the still-hidden marketplaces may not be found only in Silicon Valley and New York City. “We’re finding these overlooked founders in places where maybe other funds aren’t looking,” she said.
SNAK is itself based in Chicago, which she said some LPs have questioned. “People perceive that as a disadvantage; we view it as an advantage,” she continued. “We can get to everybody very fast.”
Tech
Uber appoints new CFO as its AV plans accelerate
Uber is promoting Balaji Krishnamurthy, its VP of strategic finance and investor relations, to be its CFO, replacing its current finance chief Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah.
Krishnamurthy has been at Uber for over six years, spending most of his tenure in the company in its investor relations division. He often posts about the company’s autonomous ride-hailing efforts, and has a board seat at AV company Waabi — so the appointment may be a signal of the company’s plans to expand its driverless investments and operations.
Indeed, on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Krishnamurthy said the company would invest capital in its AV software partners, work with AV makers by investing equity or via offtake agreements, and “support our AV infrastructure partners.”
“With large and growing free cash flows, over the coming years we will invest with discipline across a multitude of opportunities, including positioning Uber to win in an AV future,” Krishnamurthy wrote in a statement detailing the company’s Q4 results.
Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on the call that he was convinced autonomous vehicles would “unlock a multitrillion-dollar opportunity,” for the company, adding that autonomy “fundamentally amplifies” the strengths of the company’s platform.
“By the end of 2026, we expect to be facilitating AV trips in as many as 15 cities globally, with a roughly even split of U.S. and international cities. And by 2029, we intend to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world,” Khosrowshahi said.
Over the past two years, Uber has amassed partnerships with at least 20 autonomous vehicle companies across a variety of use cases, including sidewalk delivery robots, robotaxis, and trucking. Waymo is perhaps its highest profile partner with shared robotaxi operations in Atlanta and Austin. It has also struck deals with Avride, UK-based Wayve, Chinese companies WeRide, Momenta, and Volkswagen, among others.
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It has made direct investments in AV startups as well. Waabi, for instance, recently announced a $750 million Series C funding round that included an up to an additional $250 million (if it reaches certain milestones) from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more robotaxis on its platform. Uber has also invested in Silicon Valley-based Nuro and Lucid as part of a deal to launch a premium robotaxi service.
Uber said revenue rose to $14.37 billion in the fourth quarter, up 20% from a year earlier, driven by strong demand for its food delivery services.
Mahendra-Rajah is leaving Uber after three years at the company.
Tech
After backlash, Adobe cancels Adobe Animate shutdown and puts app on ‘maintenance mode’
Adobe is putting on hold its plan to discontinue Adobe Animate following intense backlash from its customers after it announced plans to shut down the 2D animation software amid an increased focus on its investments in AI.
“We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content,” the company wrote in a post on Wednesday.
Adobe’s Monday announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger, and users aired concerns about the lack of alternatives that mirror Animate’s functionality.
The company changed its tune on Wednesday, saying there would no longer be a “deadline or date by which Animate will no longer be available.”
“Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers. This applies to individual, small business, and enterprise customers. Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features. Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users - we will not be discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate,” it said.
One customer, posting on X, had asked Adobe to at least open source the software rather than abandon it. Commenters on the thread responded with angst, saying things like, “this is legit gonna ruin my life,” and, “literally what the hell are they doing? animate is the reason a good chunk of adobe users even subscribe in the first place.”
On Monday, the company updated its support site and sent emails to existing customers announcing that Adobe Animate would be discontinued on March 1, 2026. Enterprise customers would continue to receive technical support through March 1, 2029, to ease the transition, the company said at the time. Other customers would have support through March of next year.
Adobe explained its decision to discontinue the program in an FAQ, saying, “Animate has been a product that has existed for over 25 years and has served its purpose well for creating, nurturing, and developing the animation ecosystem. As technologies evolve, new platforms and paradigms emerge that better serve the needs of the users. Acknowledging this change, we are planning to discontinue supporting Animate.”
Reading between the lines, it seemed as if Adobe was saying that Animate no longer represents the current direction of the company, which is now more focused on products that incorporate AI technologies.
What’s surprising is that Adobe couldn’t even recommend software that would fully replace what customers are losing with Animate. Instead, it said customers with a Creative Cloud Pro plan can use other Adobe apps to “replace portions of Animate functionality.”
For instance, it suggested that Adobe After Effects can support complex keyframe animation using the Puppet tool, and Adobe Express can be used for animation effects that can be applied to photos, videos, text, shapes, and other design elements.
There were hints that Adobe was headed in this direction when no mention was made of Animate at the company’s annual Adobe Max conference. Plus, no 2025 version of the software was released.
Before switching to “maintenance mode,” Abode had intended for the software to continue to work for those who have it downloaded. Typically, Adobe charged $34.49 per month for the software, which dropped to $22.99 with a 12-month commitment. The annual prepaid plan was available for $263.88. Now, the company says it will be available to new users, as well.
Some users have been recommending other animation programs to use as a replacement, including Moho Animation and Toon Boom Harmony.
Updated, February 4, 2026, to note that Adobe reversed its decision and announced the software would be placed in maintenance mode instead of discontinued.
SNAK Venture Partners raises $50M fund to back vertical marketplaces
Uber appoints new CFO as its AV plans accelerate
