As artificial intelligence transforms online services, digital onboarding is becoming one of the biggest security challenges facing businesses worldwide. Fraudsters can now generate fake identities, automate account creation, and bypass traditional verification systems more easily than ever before. At the same time, companies continue spending heavily on outdated onboarding infrastructure that often creates friction for genuine users while still failing to stop sophisticated fraud. French startup Prelude is building a new approach to digital trust and onboarding, and investors are backing the company with a major new funding round.
Prelude has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by 20VC, marking the firm’s first investment in the company. Existing investors including Singular, Seedcamp, Deel, and FDJ Ventures also participated.
The round additionally included angel investors such as Steffen Tjerrild, Antoine Le Nel, and Barney Hussey Yeo.
With the latest investment, Prelude has now raised a total of $27 million.
Moving Beyond SMS Verification
Founded in 2023, Prelude initially focused on helping companies manage SMS based user verification. The startup has since evolved into a broader digital onboarding and fraud prevention platform designed to help businesses verify, protect, and continuously monitor users throughout their customer lifecycle.
The company argues that many businesses still suffer from what it calls the “hidden tax” of broken onboarding systems. According to Prelude, companies often face inflated SMS verification costs, poor conversion rates, fragmented fraud tools, and outdated infrastructure that fails to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated digital threats.
Prelude says many legacy onboarding providers still rely on limited dashboards, expensive telecom pricing models, and disconnected fraud detection systems with little operational transparency.
Building a Full Stack Trust Platform
To address these issues, Prelude has combined multiple onboarding and verification layers into a single platform.
Its infrastructure integrates verification services, fraud prevention tools, identity intelligence systems, and device level software development kits into one operational stack. The company says customers using the platform reduce verification costs by an average of 40 percent while also improving onboarding conversion rates.
Prelude believes the rapid rise of AI agents and generative AI fraud tools is fundamentally changing digital trust systems. Instead of verifying only human users, companies increasingly need to detect AI driven onboarding activity and sophisticated identity impersonation attempts.
From One Time Verification to Continuous Trust
Matias Berny said traditional fraud prevention approaches based on CAPTCHAs and isolated fraud signals are no longer sufficient in modern digital environments.
According to Berny, determining whether a user is genuine or fraudulent has evolved into a much broader intelligence problem requiring continuous contextual analysis rather than simple verification checkboxes.
Prelude’s platform combines telecom data, behavioural signals, network intelligence, and device information into a continuously updated trust profile for each user.
The company says this allows organisations to move beyond one time onboarding checks toward ongoing trust decisions throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Launching New APIs for Digital Identity Intelligence
Alongside the funding announcement, Prelude introduced two new products designed to expand its platform capabilities.
Auth API enables continuous trust and authentication checks across user interactions, while Intel API delivers real time telecom intelligence such as SIM status, phone number reputation, and network related trust signals directly into onboarding flows.
Prelude argues that mobile phone infrastructure is becoming one of the strongest trust anchors available for digital identity verification as passwords and one time codes become increasingly vulnerable to fraud and automation.
Expanding Globally
The newly raised funding will support expansion of the company’s telecom partnerships globally while financing additional machine learning development and infrastructure growth.
Prelude also plans to expand its 50 person team across engineering, infrastructure, and commercial operations.
As digital fraud becomes increasingly sophisticated in the AI era, platforms capable of combining real time identity intelligence, telecom infrastructure, and behavioural analysis into unified trust systems are becoming a critical part of the modern internet economy.
