Prelude, a company building onboarding and trust infrastructure for the AI era, announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by 20VC, with participation from existing investors Singular, Seedcamp, Deel, and FDJ UNITED Ventures.
The Paris-based company said the funding will support the expansion of its onboarding and fraud prevention platform as AI agents, bots, and synthetic identities become increasingly difficult to distinguish from real users online. Prelude also announced the launch of two new products, Prelude Auth and Intel API, expanding the company from a phone verification provider into a broader trust infrastructure platform.
Prelude said it grew revenue 6x and expanded its customer base 6x over the past year, working with companies including BeReal, Sunday, Suno, and Voodoo. The Series A round brings the company’s total funding to $27 million.
The company said onboarding legitimate users has become increasingly difficult as generative AI and fraud tooling lower the cost of impersonation. Prelude was created to help companies distinguish between real users, AI agents, bots, and malicious actors through signals such as device integrity, behavioral patterns, network fingerprints, and carrier-level checks.
Prelude initially launched with a Verify API focused on phone verification, including intelligent routing, fraud detection, and signal analysis designed to identify fraudulent activity before verification codes are sent. The company said it has processed hundreds of millions of signals and helped customers reduce fraud-related SMS costs.
The company has since expanded its platform to address broader onboarding and authentication challenges. Prelude said many businesses currently rely on multiple disconnected vendors for phone verification, fraud scoring, authentication, and device intelligence, creating operational complexity and blind spots.
Prelude’s newly launched Auth API enables companies to manage authentication and session lifecycles after onboarding, including continuous trust checks and real-time access management. The Intel API adds carrier-grade intelligence into onboarding workflows by allowing developers to query SIM status, number reputation, and connection quality in real time.
Prelude also announced the upcoming release of Watch API, a standalone anti-fraud product designed to combat SMS pumping fraud and other onboarding-related threats through customized fraud prevention models.
According to the company, the platform is designed to create a unified trust profile for each user across onboarding, verification, authentication, and session management.
Prelude said the new funding will be used to expand telecom partnerships, increase Lookup API coverage across Europe and other regions, continue investing in machine learning models for trust scoring, and grow teams across engineering, telecom partnerships, and customer success.
KEY QUOTES:
“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
“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
