- Cleavr, based in Paris, has raised an €8M seed round, led by Varsity, to automate invoice collection.
- The latest funding came six months after a €1M pre-seed round, in which Kima Ventures and Better Angle took part again.
- Cleavr says its customers have reduced payment collection time by an average of 37 per cent, and none have discontinued using the service.
Baptiste Nassoy, who previously worked as an analyst at Kima Ventures, set up Cleavr to enable finance teams to automate the process of collecting late invoices. The company announced a €8 million seed financing round, after raising a €1 million pre-seed round six months earlier.
Nassoy founded Cleavr in 2025 with Arthur Guérin, who had worked at Voodoo, and Antoine Grenard, who had worked at PwC.
AI invoice collection and performance results
Cleavr develops software that helps businesses manage unpaid customer invoices; after an invoice is sent, the system identifies the right contacts, sends reminders by email, phone, or SMS, tracks payment promises, and manages any disputes that arise.
Humans only get involved when necessary, and if a person does not respond, the AI searches for other contacts at the company and identifies itself as an AI agent when making calls.
Cleavr now serves more than 100 customers in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK, meaning its customer base has almost doubled since March. In just a few weeks, customers have reduced their days sales outstanding by 37%, collected 40 per cent more cash and saved 80 per cent of the time previously spent on collections.
The company states that it has not lost any of its customers, with early clients including Skello, Swile and Greenly, as noted by FinSMEs. Cleavr handles several billion euros worth of invoices each year, can set up new clients in 48 hours, and achieves a return on investment within 96 hours. The company has expanded from France to six markets in under seven months.
“Collections is a repetitive, unrewarding task that nobody wants to do. By delegating it to Cleavr, finance teams can focus on higher-value work,” said Nassoy, co-founder and CEO of Cleavr.
Varsity leads the round, with ongoing support from Kima and Better Angle
“We were impressed by the vision and execution capability of the Cleavr team. In just a few months, they have won over a hundred companies of all sizes, all of which confirm the solution’s impact on their cash flow. The collections market is huge and still very little automated, and Cleavr’s agentic approach has everything it takes to create a new standard of autonomous financial management,” said Didier Valet, general partner at Varsity.
Kima Ventures, Xavier Niel’s venture capital arm, invests in about 100 startups annually and has previously supported firms such as Sorare, Ledger and Alma. The French early-stage fund Better Angle, set up in 2023, has co-invested with Kima in companies including Blify and Arlequin AI.
Both funds led Cleavr’s pre-seed round, joined by Another VC, Aonia Ventures, Super Capital, and angel investors from Pennylane, MyUnisoft, and Convelio.
Portfolio Ventures, which invests in fintech and software, Kerala Ventures, an early backer of Doctolib and Malt, and Financière Saint James, the family office of Michaël Benabou, co-founder of Vente-Privée, were the three other funds that took part in the seed round. Cleavr has thus raised a total of €9M.
The founders present their model as a shift from traditional software contracts. “The era of traditional SaaS is over: businesses used to adapt to the software. AI finally lets us offer ultra-personalization at scale. Cleavr adapts to each organization, each ERP, and each internal process within days. No activation fees, no locked-in licenses. What keeps customers is the cash coming in faster,” said Guérin and Grenard, co-founders of Cleavr.
The company intends to use the new money to expand its sales team and further develop its product, with the aim of increasing growth in Europe.
Market trends and competition
Cleavr states that late payments cause almost a quarter of all business failures in France and tie up several billion euros each year. The French Payment Delays Observatory estimated that small and mid-sized companies lost €15B in 2024 as a result of such delays.
On the other hand, the situation is improving. According to a report by Altares, the average payment delay in France fell to 12.3 days in the first six months of 2026, the best figure in the previous three years and below the European average of 13.1 days. That said, only 49.7% of French companies paid their suppliers on time, and the number of business failures remained high at 71,700 by the end of August.
Rivalry is on the rise. The company Upflow, which was established in France, secured a Series A funding round of $15 million in 2021. In January 2026, Paraglide, based in Sweden, raised €4.2 million for receivables agents, and in November 2025, Donnerstag.ai, based in Frankfurt, raised €4.3 million. Lunos AI, based in New York, raised $5 million in September 2025.
Nassoy states that its older tools automate around 20% of collections, primarily through scheduled reminders, whereas Cleavr asserts it can automate as much as 80%.
The real challenge for Cleavr is whether it can retain its more than 100 customers if the accounting platforms it connects to, such as Pennylane, decide to include invoice chasing as a built-in feature.
