Every day, finance teams at companies around the world spend hours chasing payments, disputing invoices and haggling over terms with suppliers and customers. Causa Prima, a startup founded only this year, believes artificial intelligence agents can handle much of that back-and-forth automatically, and investors have just put $20 million behind the idea.
The company announced a seed round on October 13, led by Base10 Partners, with new investors QED Investors and FJ Labs joining existing backers Creandum, Kfund and Borusan Ventures. The round brings Causa Prima's total funding to $30 million, including a $10 million pre-seed round raised in June. It did not disclose its valuation.
Causa Prima has offices in Madrid and Munich, plans to open in New York, and will use the new capital to expand into the United States and continue developing its platform.
Agents on both sides of the deal
Most finance automation software works inside a single company, helping it process invoices, reconcile accounts or forecast cash. Causa Prima is targeting the space between companies. It is building a shared network in which one AI agent represents a buyer and another represents a supplier. The agents work through invoice disputes, agree payment timing and negotiate early-payment discounts, giving finance teams on both sides a clearer view of expected cash flow.
The logic is that many of the frictions in business-to-business payments arise from a lack of coordination. A supplier does not know when it will be paid, a buyer disputes a line item, emails go unanswered, and money sits in limbo for weeks. If both parties' agents can communicate directly and continuously within agreed rules, many of those disputes could be resolved in minutes rather than weeks.
"The biggest inefficiency in corporate finance is no longer inside the company," said Maex Ament, Causa Prima's co-founder and chief executive. He argues that the next major piece of financial infrastructure will be built between companies, not inside them.
A founder who has done this before
Ament's background explains why investors moved quickly. He began his career as a software engineer at SAP and in 2009 co-founded Taulia, a working capital platform credited with pioneering dynamic discounting, in which suppliers can choose to be paid early in exchange for a small discount. SAP acquired a majority stake in Taulia in March 2022. Ament later co-founded Centrifuge, a platform for tokenising real-world assets.
His co-founders bring complementary experience. Henrik Gebbing co-founded Finoa, a Berlin-based digital asset custodian, in 2018 after three years at McKinsey. Chief technology officer Philip Stanislaus led more than 600 enterprise security audits at Oak Security and previously ran engineering under Ament at Centrifuge.
That pedigree matters in a market where trust is paramount. Companies are cautious about letting software negotiate on their behalf, especially when cash is involved, and a team with a track record in enterprise finance and security has a stronger chance of winning that trust.
Traction and investors
Causa Prima says it has more than 3,000 active accounts and is onboarding enterprise customers that are multibillion-dollar businesses. It has about 25 employees.
Base10 Partners, which led the round, focuses on companies automating the "real economy" and counts Nubank, Brex and Instacart among its portfolio companies. In June, it closed two funds totalling $850 million, bringing its assets under management to $2.6 billion. QED Investors is a specialist fintech investor, and FJ Labs focuses on marketplaces and businesses with network effects.
Rexhi Dollaku, a general partner at Base10, said: "Causa Prima is building for the handoff between companies." He added that the speed of the company's progress from pre-seed to seed reflected the size of the problem and the pace at which the team is building.
A large and painful problem
Late payment is a chronic problem in business. A 2026 survey by trade credit insurer Atradius of more than 600 North American businesses found that late payments affect seven in ten companies, with overdue invoices averaging 23% of receivables. For small and mid-sized suppliers in particular, delayed payments can strain working capital, force expensive borrowing and threaten survival.
The issue resonates strongly in India, where delayed payments to micro, small and medium enterprises have long been a policy concern. The government has introduced measures such as the Trade Receivables Discounting System, which lets MSMEs sell invoices to financiers, and tax rules that require larger buyers to pay registered micro and small suppliers within 45 days to claim the expense as a deduction. Technology that speeds up dispute resolution and payment between buyers and suppliers could complement such policies.
Dynamic discounting, the model Ament helped popularise at Taulia, shows the kind of value at stake. Under traditional trade terms, a buyer might offer a supplier a small discount, say 2%, in exchange for paying within 10 days instead of 30. Negotiating and tracking such arrangements manually across thousands of suppliers is impractical, so much of that value goes unrealised. Agents that can propose, accept and execute such terms automatically could unlock savings for buyers and faster cash for suppliers at scale.
Competition in agentic finance
Causa Prima is entering a fast-growing field. AI agents for business finance have become one of the hottest areas of venture investment, and the company faces competition from startups including Stuut, which raised a $52.5 million Series B in early October, Cleavr, which raised an €8 million seed round, and Round.
Its differentiator is the two-sided network. If buyers and suppliers both join, each new participant makes the network more valuable for everyone else, a dynamic that can create strong competitive advantages but is notoriously difficult to establish. Payment networks typically face a chicken-and-egg problem: suppliers want buyers on the platform and vice versa.
What to watch
The US expansion will be a major test. The American B2B payments market is enormous but fragmented, with entrenched practices and long sales cycles for enterprise software. Winning large buyers, who can bring thousands of suppliers onto the network, will be key.
The broader question is whether companies are ready to let AI agents negotiate on their behalf. Early signs suggest finance leaders are open to automation that saves time and improves cash visibility, provided they retain control over the rules. If Causa Prima can show that its agents reliably reduce disputes and speed up payments without creating new risks, it could help define how companies transact with one another in an age of autonomous software.
