Prelude raises $20 Million Series A to build the onboarding and trust layer for the AI age

Code can speak like a friend. Machines can pass as human at a glance. AI agents are already reaching signup flows on behalf of users, and bots are expected to represent a greater share of online traffic than humans by 2027.¹ Most of that traffic will be AI agents acting on behalf of real people, and the tools built to block bots cannot tell a good agent from a malicious one. 

We built Prelude because someone has to tell you who is really there, on a real device, in a real session, every time a user reaches for your product.

Today we are excited to announce $20M in Series A funding, led by 20VC, with participation from existing investors Singular, Seedcamp, Deel and FDJ UNITED Ventures.

Alongside the round, we are launching two new products, Prelude Auth and Intel API, to take Prelude from a phone verification API to the full trust infrastructure for digital onboarding. Across humans, bots, and the agents now acting for both.

The numbers behind the round

We grew revenue 6x and expanded our customer base 6x over the past year working with companies like BeReal, Sunday, Suno, Voodoo. This Series A brings our total funding to $27M. The growth matters less than what is behind it: every customer we added was a product team that decided to replace a legacy verification provider, consolidate multiple tools into one, or finally take fraud seriously without sacrificing conversion. That is the market signal we have been following.

Why we built Prelude

Onboarding a real user has never been harder. Fake signups are scaling faster than ever, powered by generative AI and a new wave of fraud tooling that drops the cost of impersonating a person close to zero. The obvious response, more verification steps, makes the problem worse. Every extra check costs you real users at the door.

Having learned that lesson the hard way building consumer apps, we came to Prelude with three hard-won principles:

• First impressions decide everything. A broken signup is usually the last interaction a user has with your product.

• Every percentage point of conversion counts. The math compounds across the funnel and across the lifetime of the customer.

• Fraud kills LTV. A fake signup is not a free seat. It poisons the metrics, the routing, and the retention.

So we built Prelude to do the work in the background. Verification happens against signals the user never has to think about: device integrity, behavioral patterns, network fingerprints, and carrier-level checks. Real users walk through. Bad actors get stopped.

From phone verify to behavioral antifraud

Building a proper onboarding flow today means assembling a patchwork of disconnected tools. A verification provider for the OTP. A fraud vendor for risk scoring. An identity provider for auth management. A separate SDK for device signals. Each with its own contract, its own integration, its own blind spots.

We started inside that patchwork, with a Verify API that took phone verification seriously: intelligent routing, machine learning fraud detection, and a signal layer that assessed whether a user was real before the code even left our network. Hundreds of millions of signals processed. Millions saved for our customers by blocking SMS pumping and fraud before it hit their bills. BeReal, Sunday, Suno, Voodoo trusted us with the moments where their users decide whether to stay. We listened, watched the patterns they kept hitting, and built  where they pointed.

What they needed was not another point tool. It was a holistic platform with synergetic products, where every signal sharpens every other one. The question shifted from “is this a valid phone number?” to “is this a real user, across every touchpoint?” Telling a legitimate AI agent from a malicious one, or a real user from a sophisticated bot, is a behavioral question. It is not answered by a single check.

So we invested deep in network fingerprinting to call the bluff: hard-to-fake tells like network fingerprints, device integrity, and the shape of the connection itself. It is poker. The cards are the OTP. The tells are every other signal, and we built Prelude to read them.

That is what Prelude is now. One profile per user, one platform, products that work as a single  system. Not a patchwork.

"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 Lookup API, it carries more trust than any password or one-time code ever did."

— Matias Berny, Co-founder, Prelude

“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.”

— Paul Bonnet, General Partner,20VC

Introducing Prelude's full onboarding and trust suite

The two products we mentioned at the top - Auth and the Auth API - close the loop on this vision.

The Auth API gives product teams full control over the user lifecycle after verification. From first authentication to logout, teams can track active sessions, revoke access instantly, and run continuous trust checks. A user who passed verification at signup but starts behaving like a bot two weeks in gets caught before they cost you anything. All of it lands directly into the onboarding flow, without stitching together multiple vendors or managing the infrastructure yourself.

The Intel API brings carrier-grade intelligence directly into onboarding flows. It lets developers query SIM status, number reputation, and connection quality in real time, adding a layer of trust that lives entirely at the network level and requires nothing from the user. Combined with our existing Verify API and front-end SDKs, it closes the last gap between what a user claims and what their device and network actually reveal.

And Prelude isn't stopping there. On top of the new Auth API and Intel API, Prelude is releasing Watch API, a standalone anti-fraud product that takes the experience built into the Verify API fighting SMS pumping fraud and turns it into a fraud prevention model tailored to each business.

Together, these products turn Prelude into a single platform that covers the full arc of user onboarding: from the first signal collected on a device, through phone verification, all the way to session lifecycle management. One integration. One trust profile. Built to evolve with the user, not just validate them once.

“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”

Quentin Le Bras, Co-founder, Prelude

What's next with the round

The $20M goes straight into the platform:

• Deeper telco partnerships, with direct routes to more carriers in more countries.

• Lookup API coverage across Europe and beyond.

• Continued investment in the machine learning models that turn raw signals into actionable trust scores.

• New hires across engineering, telco partnerships, and customer success.

Thank you to our customers, team, friends, and investors

None of this would exist without the companies and people that bet on us early. Our customers pushed us to go further, faster, and gave us the real-world signal we needed to build something useful. They are the reason we obsess over conversion rates, fraud rates, and developer experience in equal measure.

To our team: building infrastructure across telecom, fraud prevention, and identity is hard work. The care and craft you bring to it every day is what makes Prelude worth building.

And to our investors: Singular and Seedcamp, who backed us from the beginning; 20VC for leading this next chapter; and Deel and FDJ UNITED Ventures for joining us at this stage. And the operators and angels who lent us their experience along the way: Steffen Tjerrild (COO & Co-founder, Synthesia), Willem Delbare (Co-founder, Aikido Security), Antoine Le Nel (Global CGO & CMO, Revolut), Felix Blossier (Co-Founder, Pennylane), George Arison (CEO, Grindr), Barney Hussey-Yeo (Founder & CEO, Cleo), Will Wu (Former CTO,Match Group),  Barnabás Birmacher (CEO, Bitrise), Benjamin Netter (Founder, Riot), Henri Moissinac (Ceo, Dott) and many more.

Thank you for believing that the identity trust layer for the internet is still being written, and that Prelude is the team to write it.

The internet is being rewritten right now, by code that speaks like a friend and by agents that act in our name. We are here to make sure that, underneath all of it, every “hello” comes from someone real, every session is legitimate, and every product gets to grow on the strength of the users who actually showed up.

Thank you for being part of that.

Matias Berny, Co-founder, Prelude

Paris, May 20, 2026