Causa Prima Raises $20M to Build AI Agents That Negotiate B2B Payments Across Companies

Causa Prima, a startup building artificial intelligence agents that negotiate payments directly between businesses, has closed a $20 million seed round led by Base10 Partners to accelerate its expansion into the United States. The financing, which closed in September, brings the company’s total capital raised to $30 million following a $10 million pre-seed round earlier this year. Investors include QED Investors, FJ Labs, Creandum, Kfund, and Borusan Ventures. The company declined to disclose its valuation.

The funding underscores a growing bet among venture capitalists that the next frontier in enterprise automation isn’t streamlining internal workflows — it’s automating the messy, email-heavy handoffs between companies. Business-to-business payments total roughly $98 trillion annually, according to Fortune Business Insights, while Mastercard estimates the broader addressable market at $125 trillion. Yet nearly half of accounts payable executives cite slow invoice approvals as their top challenge, with average processing times exceeding eight days, per a 2025 Ardent Partners report.

“Every dollar going into AP and AR automation today assumes the bottleneck sits inside one company,” said Rexhi Dollaku, general partner at Base10 Partners. “Causa Prima is building for the handoff between companies.”

Most accounts payable and receivable platforms — including Tipalti, Bill.com, and Taulia, the supply-chain finance company founded by Causa Prima co-founder Maex Ament — focus on digitizing paperwork within a single enterprise. Causa Prima’s approach deploys autonomous agents on both sides of a transaction: one representing the buyer’s accounts payable department, the other the supplier’s accounts receivable team. The agents exchange data, reconcile discrepancies, negotiate early-payment discounts, and execute settlements without human intervention unless an exception arises.

The company monetizes by taking a percentage of the early-payment discounts its agents secure, aligning revenue with working-capital savings for both parties. Dynamic discounting programs have existed for years, but adoption has been limited by the manual effort required to enroll suppliers, calculate optimal rates, and manage ongoing negotiations. Causa Prima argues that agent-to-agent communication removes that friction at scale.

The founding team brings deep fintech and blockchain experience. Ament, a former SAP engineer, founded Taulia in 2009 and later Centrifuge, a decentralized finance protocol for tokenizing real-world assets. Henrik Gebbing, who spent three years at McKinsey & Company, co-founded Finoa, a regulated crypto custodian. The two met in Madrid nearly a decade ago while pitching their respective startups to local VCs — who passed but introduced them after noticing both were German founders married to Spanish women. Philip Stanislaus, who led engineering at Centrifuge under Ament, serves as chief technology officer.

Causa Prima currently employs 25 people across Madrid and Munich. The new capital will fund a New York office opening in early 2025, positioning the company closer to the U.S. mid-market enterprises that represent its initial target customers. Expansion into the United States introduces regulatory complexity: the company must navigate state money-transmitter licensing, NACHA rules for ACH payments, and the emerging Federal Reserve FedNow instant-payment rail, alongside GDPR compliance for its European operations.

Competitors in the agentic AI space include Adept and Orby AI, which focus on general-purpose workplace automation, and protocol-layer projects like Fetch.ai that aim to create open marketplaces for autonomous agents. Causa Prima’s narrow focus on the AP/AR interface — and its founders’ domain expertise in supply-chain finance — may offer a faster path to revenue, though it also limits the total addressable market compared to horizontal agent platforms.

The company plans to launch its first production deployments with design partners in the first quarter of 2025.