Causa Prima, a startup building AI agents that negotiate invoices and payment terms between companies, has raised a $20m seed round led by Base10 Partners, it announced on October 13, 2026. Fortune reported that the round closed in September.
QED Investors and FJ Labs joined as new investors, and existing backers Creandum, Kfund and Borusan Ventures also took part. The company did not disclose its valuation.
The seed came about three months after a $10m pre-seed round and takes Causa Prima's total funding to $30m.
“The biggest inefficiency in corporate finance is no longer inside the company. It is between companies. That is where the next generation of financial infrastructure will be built.”Maex Ament, Co-founder and CEO, Causa Prima
What Causa Prima does
Most finance software automates work inside one company. Causa Prima instead puts an agent on each side of a transaction: one working for the buyer's accounts payable team and one for the supplier's accounts receivable team. The agents work on a shared network, handle invoice approvals and disputes, and negotiate payment timing and early-payment discounts.
The company earns a cut when its agents negotiate an early payment between a buyer and a supplier, according to Fortune. It says more than 3,000 active accounts use its network and that it is onboarding large enterprise customers.
Causa Prima has 25 employees across offices in Madrid and Munich, Fortune reported. The company is incorporated in Delaware.
The founders
The company was founded in 2026 by Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing and Philip Stanislaus. Ament, the chief executive, began as a software engineer at SAP and co-founded Taulia in 2009, a supply-chain finance company in which SAP bought a majority stake in 2022. He later founded Centrifuge, which tokenises real-world assets.
Gebbing co-founded Berlin digital asset custodian Finoa in 2018 after three years at McKinsey. Stanislaus, the chief technology officer, previously led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge.
Who invested and what the money is for
Base10 general partner Rexhi Dollaku said accounts payable and receivable automation has so far assumed the bottleneck sits inside a single company, while Causa Prima is building for the handoff between companies. He said following the pre-seed so quickly reflected both the size of the problem and the team's pace.
Creandum led the earlier pre-seed in June 2026, with Kfund and HelloWorld taking part, Munich Startup reported. Causa Prima plans to use the new money to keep developing its platform and to open a New York office as it expands into the United States.
A busy market for finance agents
Investors have been backing AI agents for back-office finance, though most serve only one side of a payment. Tech Funding News noted that New York's Stuut raised a $52.5m Series B on October 7 for order-to-cash automation, and that Paris-based Cleavr raised an €8m seed on October 6 to chase overdue invoices.
Fortune cited estimates that payments between businesses total about $98tn a year. The open question for Causa Prima is adoption, since its network only works when both buyers and suppliers join.
Company website: causaprima.com