- Pliant has closed an $80 million Series C round, led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest.
- The Berlin fintech wants its AI agents to move the funds via its licensed payment infrastructure.
- The company has now passed the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark.
Pliant’s founders started the company in a very challenging time. Malte Rau and Fabian Terner founded the Berlin-based business in spring 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns, as Wirecard, Germany’s largest payments company, imploded in a fraud scandal that summer.
Over six years on, Pliant is now past the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark and has just raised $80 million in Series C funding to pursue a new opportunity: AI agent-powered payments.
Seaya Nova and Speedinvest led the oversubscribed round. Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners, and Molten Ventures also joined, having previously invested in Pliant. The funds will help Pliant expand into the US and Canada, enter additional international markets, and develop what they call agentic payments.
This round is double the $40 million Series B that Pliant closed in April 2025, also led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest. Pliant used that prior round to fund its US expansion. Based on our calculations, Pliant’s total equity funding now exceeds $180 million. The company also has debt facilities in place, including a €100 million facility, announced in January 2024.
From launching during lockdown to reaching $100 million in ARR
Rau has over 10 years’ experience in fintech and banking. In a 2022 guest column on launching Pliant during Covid and the Wirecard collapse, he had KPMG, auxmoney and Rocket Internet on his CV. Before Pliant, he founded a startup called Geldspeicher and served as interim CRO at FinCompare, the business finance platform. Terner, Pliant’s co-founder and CPO, also worked at FinCompare and previously at lender Lendico.
The company started out with corporate credit cards for German businesses and has since broadened its offering. Pliant now provides a full suite of commercial card services, including card issuance, payment accounts, foreign exchange, and spend management, all designed to integrate with other software.
Banks and software companies use it to run their own card programmes. Commerzbank is a good example, launching a digital card for its business customers in 2024 via Pliant.
By their own account, they’ve doubled their business for three years in a row. 300+ people employed across eight offices, billions of dollars in payments every year for clients in travel, insurance, AI-native businesses, banks and fintechs. They acquired Austrian insurtech hi.health in April 2025 to expand into insurance claims payments.
The AI agent opportunity, and how early it is
Pliant argues that software agents need to be underpinned by a licensed company. Its AI agents already do recurring finance work for customers.
Outside agents, whether assistants like Claude or ChatGPT or in-house agents, are all connected via the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants call out to other software and initiate payment workflows. Agents will have permissions, spending controls and audit trails.
Pliant is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard and issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries under a European e-money licence with regulated partners in the UK and US.
“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. Whether an established business wants AI to automate its payment processes with the right guardrails, or an AI-native company needs a licensed partner that moves as fast as it does, Pliant is built for that,” said Rau, Pliant’s CEO and co-founder.
Grand View Research estimated agentic commerce at $5.71 billion in 2025 and $65.47 billion by 2033.
Pliant isn’t the only company in the space. Stripe launched agent-compatible payment tools in 2025, and Visa and Mastercard have both announced agent payment programmes. Stockholm’s SolvaPay has raised €2.4 million to build payment infrastructure for agents. Guardrails are also becoming a standalone product offering, with Crux Labs raising over $6 million to audit AI agents.
Ramp comparison and what’s next
Pliant faces much bigger, better-funded players. Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation in June and has reported over $1 billion in revenue. Capital One acquired Brex for $5.15 billion in 2026, which is less than half of Brex’s $12.3 billion valuation in 2022. In Europe, Payhawk reportedly began early talks in Jan to raise over $100 million at a valuation just under $2 billion.
Pliant, on the other hand, also provides infrastructure to banks and software houses creating their own card products.
“Pliant has solved some of the most complex challenges in commercial payments, and as AI changes how companies move money, the licensed infrastructure underneath becomes more important, not less. Malte, Fabian and the team are positioned to be the payment partner of choice for this new generation of businesses, in Europe, North America and beyond,” said Vinoth Jayakumar, managing partner at Seaya Nova.
Speedinvest partner Tom Filip Lesche then said Pliant was building “the future infrastructure of corporate payments.”
Pliant’s growth is still being driven by card issuers issuing cards to individuals. The fresh investment bets that software will eventually handle transactions as well as human agents, letting the licensed provider take a slice.
