- Causa Prima has raised $10 million in pre-seed funding to build a shared network. On this network, AI agents for buyers and suppliers will automatically handle invoices, disputes, and payment terms.
- Creandum, which has also backed Klarna, Spotify, and Trade Republic, led the round. One of Causa Prima’s co-founders invented dynamic discounting and previously built a company that processed $50 billion per quarter for five million suppliers before SAP acquired it.
- The AP and AR automation market could reach $7.8 billion by 2031. But the systems connecting both sides of B2B transactions were built for people, not for the AI agents that companies are starting to use.
When manufacturers and suppliers dispute invoices, the process is often repetitive. Emails go back and forth, follow-ups get missed, and the issue drags on until someone finally calls.
After 15 years working on software for this problem, Maex Ament realised the real issue is that buyers and suppliers use different systems. Now, he wants to build a solution that works without people needing to step in.
Causa Prima, based in Madrid and Munich, today announced its $10 million pre-seed round, led by Creandum, with support from Kfund, HelloWorld, Angel Invest, and angel investors from Qonto, Pennylane, SAP, ING, SoFi, LIDL, and DeepMind.
The problem that software has never solved
The accounts payable automation market was worth $3.85 billion in 2023 and could reach $7.8 billion by 2031, but these forecasts assume work happens at a human pace. As more agent-to-agent transactions happen, current systems may face challenges sooner than expected.
“We’ve spent 25 years building the systems that move money between companies, and the problem in B2B finance was never inside a single company, but in the space between two. Once both sides run agents that negotiate in real time, the disputes and fixed payment terms that have defined this industry for centuries stop being necessary,” says Ament.
He previously founded dynamic discounting and co-founded Taulia, which SAP bought in 2022 after it processed $50 billion per quarter for five million suppliers. Ament co-founder Henrik Gebbing grew Finoa, a German digital asset company, to €10 billion in assets under custody. Philip Stanislaus, Causa Prima’s third co-founder, led more than 600 enterprise security audits at Oak Security.
The company brings buyers and suppliers together on a single network, allowing AI agents on both sides to handle invoicing, dispute resolution, and payment-term negotiations automatically. For instance, a manufacturer with 5,000 suppliers might spend weeks emailing back and forth about a single disputed invoice between accounts payable and receivable teams.
On Causa Prima’s network, agents settle disputes in seconds and find the best terms for both sides. The platform also helps large companies get early-payment discounts, which are often missed when processes are manual. The company says it serves more than 3,000 active accounts.
Causa Prima’s main competitors are SAP Taulia, which Ament co-founded and is now part of a large enterprise software group, Coupa, which launched AI-powered B2B payment analytics in early 2025, and AvidXchange, which TPG and Corpay bought in January 2025 for $2.2 billion.
While other platforms automate just one side of a transaction, Causa Prima offers a two-sided network, which it sees as a completely different approach. It removes the need for handoffs between AP and AR, instead of just speeding up each side separately.
Why Creandum backed it
The AP and AR automation market has attracted significant investment lately. AvidXchange’s $2.2 billion sale and SAP’s continued investment in Taulia show that industry leaders see this market as important. Causa Prima argues that current solutions only improve a flawed system rather than replace it.
Simon Schmincke, a partner at Creandum who led the investment, says the founders’ track record is what made this compelling. “This team already built the rails nearly every supplier in the world uses to get paid today, so no one knows better what’s broken, or is better placed to fix it. With Causa Prima and its agent-to-agent network, getting paid early stops being a dream finance teams gave up on years ago, and becomes the new default,” he concludes.
The fresh investment will help Causa Prima grow its engineering and product teams in Madrid and Munich. Its goal is to eliminate payment terms altogether. Net-30, net-60, and net-90 invoices were designed for human processing speeds. Now that agents can settle transactions instantly, these fixed timeframes are no longer needed.
The big question is whether companies that rely on traditional payment cycles can adapt fast enough to take advantage of this change.
