Zenly alumni raise $20m for Paris-based Prelude to rebuild digital onboarding
CEO Matias Berny and CPO/co-founder Quentin Le Bras founded Prelude in 2022 to turn the phone number from a one-time passcode into a continuous trust and fraud defense layer; its Auth and Intel APIs underpin a full-stack onboarding platform and ~40% lower verification costs.
By Ryan Merket · · updated
Why it matters
Account opening and verification costs are rising while AI-driven fraud gets harder to spot. Prelude's ex-Zenly team is betting on continuous trust built on telecom signals, not one-shot CAPTCHAs or OTPs. A $20m bet from 20VC and noted operators signals demand for better onboarding economics and fraud defenses.
CEO Matias Berny and Chief Product Officer and co-founder Quentin Le Bras have raised $20 million for Prelude, a Paris-based trust and onboarding infrastructure company, in a Series A led by 20VC, according to Tech.eu. Existing backers Singular, Seedcamp, Deel and FDJ Ventures joined, alongside angels including Synthesia co-founder Steffen Tjerrild, Revolut CMO Antoine Le Nel, and Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo. The company has raised $27 million to date.
Berny and Le Bras previously worked together at Zenly, the location-sharing app acquired by Snap and later shut down, where they first encountered the frustrations of managing SMS verification and user onboarding. They founded Prelude in 2022, initially focused on SMS verification before expanding to a full-stack onboarding platform that packages a verification provider, a fraud vendor, an identity layer, and a device SDK. The company says customers save about 40% on verification costs while improving conversion. "The old playbook is broken. CAPTCHAs don't stop bots anymore... Telling a real user from a fake one is now a business intelligence problem," Berny said, as quoted by Tech.eu.
The company is pitching continuous trust instead of one-off checks, reframing the phone number from a simple one-time passcode to a continuous layer of network trust and fraud defense. Its platform combines telecom data, network signals, and behavioral patterns into a per-user trust profile, and it has launched two products: its Auth API for continuous trust checks and its Intel API product, which surfaces real-time signals like SIM status and number reputation into onboarding flows. The new funding will go to expand telecom partnerships globally, invest in machine learning systems, and grow the 50-person team across engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market.