Pliant, a Berlin company that provides corporate cards and B2B payment infrastructure, raised $80m in a Series C round announced on 4 November 2026. The company said the round was oversubscribed.
Seaya Nova and Speedinvest co-led the round. Existing investors Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures also took part. Pliant did not disclose a valuation.
The new round is twice the size of the $40m Series B Pliant closed in April 2025. The company will use the money to expand in the US and Canada, prepare entry into more international markets and build what it calls agentic payments, where AI agents carry out business payments on its licensed infrastructure.
“We built Pliant as an API-first, modular B2B payments platform from day one”Malte Rau, CEO and co-founder, Pliant
What Pliant does
Pliant sells corporate credit cards, payment accounts, foreign exchange and spend management to businesses. It built the products to plug into other software through APIs. Banks, fintechs and software platforms also use it to launch card programmes under their own brands. Tech Funding News reported that Commerzbank launched a digital business card through Pliant in 2024.
The company is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard. It issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries. Its EU cards are issued by its Finnish entity, Pliant Oy, under a European e-money licence, and UK cards are issued through a regulated partner. Customers include businesses in travel and insurance, AI-native companies, banks and fintechs, and Pliant said they process billions of dollars of payments a year through the platform.
In April 2025 Pliant bought hi.health, an Austrian insurtech, to move into payments for insurance claims, according to Tech Funding News.
Payments for AI agents
Much of the pitch for this round is about AI. Pliant argues that as companies let software agents handle more finance work, those agents need a licensed payments provider with spending controls and audit trails behind them. Tech Funding News reported that agents would connect to Pliant through the Model Context Protocol, and that Pliant's own agents already handle recurring finance tasks for customers.
"We built Pliant as an API-first, modular B2B payments platform from day one, and we have adopted AI deeply, in our product and in how we run the company," said Malte Rau, chief executive and co-founder. He said the new money would open more of the company's infrastructure directly to AI agents.
Vinoth Jayakumar, a general partner at Seaya Nova, said the licensed infrastructure underneath becomes more important, not less, as AI changes how companies move money.
Growth and the funding so far
Pliant said its annual recurring revenue passed $100m shortly before the round and that its business has doubled in each of the last three years. It employs more than 300 people across eight offices.
Rau founded the company in 2020 with Fabian Terner, now chief product officer. According to Tech Funding News, Rau previously worked at KPMG, auxmoney and Rocket Internet, and Terner worked at FinCompare and the lender Lendico.
Pliant's press page lists a seed round closed in December 2021, a $28m Series A in March 2023 and Series A extensions in January and April 2024, the second led by PayPal Ventures. Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest led the April 2025 Series B, which funded the company's first push into the US, Tech Funding News reported. The company also announced a €100m debt facility in January 2024. Tech Funding News calculates that Pliant has raised more than $180m in equity in total.
The market Pliant is entering is crowded. Tech Funding News pointed to US spend-management company Ramp, which raised $750m at a $44bn valuation in June, and to Capital One's $5.15bn acquisition of Brex this year.
Company website: getpliant.com