20VC leads $20m Series A investment in onboarding startup Prelude

French digital onboarding startup Prelude has raised $20m in a Series A funding round led by Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, which is investing in the startup for the first time. Other investors in the round include existing investors Singular, Seedcamp, Deel and FDJ Ventures.

Angel investors in the round include Synthesia co-founder Steffen Tjerrild; Antoine Le Nel, Revolut CMO; and Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo. Prelude has raised $27m to date.

Founded in 2023, Prelude started by helping companies with user SMS verification but is evolving into a full-stack platform for digital onboarding, helping companies verify and protect users, from issues like fraud, during their time as customers.

It says it’s fixing the “hidden tax" of broken onboarding that companies face, pointing to inflated SMS bills and fraud that slips through the net.

It argues that legacy providers still charge extortionate rates, rely on outdated dashboards which lack any granularity, and offer limited customer support.

To remedy this, Prelude has bundled a stack of discounted tools, including a verification provider, a fraud vendor, an identity layer, and a device SDK, which it says results in customers saving 40 per cent on verification costs on average, while also improving conversion rates.

Prelude's raise also comes amid the arrival of AI agents, which are onboarding instead of humans, while advances in generative AI and fraud tooling, have made it significantly easier to impersonate real users.

Matias Berny, co-founder and CEO, Prelude: "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 says its platform addresses this by combining telecom data, network signals, and behavioural patterns into a single trust profile per user - allowing companies to move from one-time verification to continuous trust decisions.

Prelude has also launched two new products: Auth API and Intel API.

Auth API, it says, enables continuous trust checks across the full user lifecycle; and Intel API, which, it says, brings real-time intelligence - such as SIM status and number reputation - directly into onboarding flows.

Prelude will use the funding to expand telecom partnerships globally, invest in machine learning systems and grow its 50-strong team across engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market.