Paris-based Prelude raises €17.2 million Series A to scale its onboarding and trust infrastructure platform

Prelude, a Paris-based onboarding and trust infrastructure platform helping companies verify and protect users across their entire lifecycle, has raised €17.2 million ($20 million) in a Series A funding round. 

The funding round was led by 20VC, with participation from Singular, Seedcamp, Deel, and FDJ Ventures. Angel investors such as Steffen Tjerrild (COO and co-founder, Synthesia), Willem Delbare (co-founder, Aikido Security), Antoine Le Nel (Global CGO and CMO, Revolut), Felix Blossier (Pennylane co-founder), George Arison (CEO, Grindr), Barney Hussey-Yeo (Founder and CEO of Cleo), Will Wu (Former CTO, Match Group), and others also contributed. 

Paul Bonnet, General Partner at 20VC, said, “Most companies running phone verification get scammed: pump fraud, opaque pricing, nonexistent customer support. Prelude is the only platform solving all three pains at once: their customers are cutting verification costs by over 40%, converting more users, and actually getting a response when something breaks. Matias and Quentin solved this at Zenly, then built it for everyone else. We are also excited about the launch of their Auth product.”

Founded in 2023 by Matias Berny and Quentin Le Bras, Prelude enables continuous trust decisions that improve conversion while reducing fraud by combining telecom data, behavioural signals, and machine learning. 

The company describes broken onboarding as a hidden cost companies bear daily, including inflated SMS bills from fraud, genuine users abandoning at the OTP screen, and fraud that evades checks until after damage occurs. 

Prelude states that legacy providers still charge extortionate rates, rely on outdated dashboards that lack granularity, and offer limited customer support. 

To effectively address this issue, Prelude bundled a stack of previously disconnected and dysfunctional tools, including: a verification provider, a fraud vendor, an identity layer, and a device SDK.

As a result, Prelude claims that companies working with it save 40% on verification costs on average, while improving conversion rates.

Matias Berny, co-founder and CEO, Prelude, said, “The old playbook is broken. CAPTCHAs don’t stop bots anymore, and a single fraud signal won’t tell you who’s really there. Telling a real user from a fake one is now a business intelligence problem, not a checkbox. The phone number is becoming the strongest anchor we have, and with the Intel API, it carries more trust than any password or one-time code ever did.”

Prelude’s platform addresses this by combining telecom data, device intelligence, network signals, and behavioural patterns into a single trust profile per user, allowing companies to move from one-time verification to continuous trust decisions.

Today, the company is also launching two new products: Auth API and the Intel API. Auth API enables continuous trust checks across the full user lifecycle. Intel API provides real-time carrier intelligence, such as SIM status and number reputation, directly into onboarding flows. Combined with Prelude’s Verify API and front-end SDKs, the Intel API closes the gap between what a user claims and what their device and network actually reveal.

Quentin Le Bras, co-founder and CTO, Prelude, said, “The question used to be ‘is this a valid phone number?’ It is now ‘is this a legitimate user, across every touchpoint?’ Bots are indistinguishable from humans at the surface level, synthetic identities pass basic checks, and AI agents are taking real actions on behalf of real users. No single signal can answer that question anymore. The companies winning at onboarding will be the ones who treat trust as continuous infrastructure, not a one-time gate.”

The company reports that it has grown revenue and customers 6x over the past year, and now works with companies such as one of the largest social media platforms globally, as well as Suno, BeReal, Sunday, and Voodoo. 

This funding will enable Prelude to expand from phone verification to a full-stack trust platform for digital onboarding, including the launch of Auth API and Intel API.

In November 2024, the company secured €7.6 million in Seed funding led by Singular and Seedcamp. With $27 million raised to date, the company will focus its efforts on expanding direct telecom partnerships globally, scaling Intel API coverage across Europe and beyond, investing further in machine learning systems powering real-time trust decisions, and growing teams across engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market. 

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