If you ever needed hard evidence that AI agents are about to take over the work of humans, this is it. German/Madrid startups Causa Prima has emerged from stealth with a $10 million pre-seed round to build a financial network where AI agents negotiate directly between corporate buyers and suppliers.
Creandum led the round, with participation from Kfund, HelloWorld and Angel Invest. Founders and executives from Qonto, Pennylane, SAP, ING, SoFi, Lidl and DeepMind also invested.
The Madrid- and Munich-based startup is targeting the manual work that sits between accounts payable and accounts receivable systems. While existing finance software generally serves either the buyer or supplier, Causa Prima connects both parties on the same network, thus rather disrupting the existing paradigm.
Its agents are designed to handle invoice approvals, payment disputes and early-settlement negotiations without the email chains and human intervention normally required when two companies need to agree terms.
Founder and CEO Maex Ament teold me over an interview that he built the startup because the existing finance stack is already struggling with the volume of work passing through it, and that the introduction of AI could compound the problem.
“Agents are actually producing more work in some areas,” he said. “Everything will be 10x or 100x, and our backend systems, our CFO stack and our finance operations teams are just not prepared for that.”
Ament argues that most enterprise agents still reach a dead end when they need to interact with another company.
“On the other side, it sends an email to a human being,” he said. “We thought: why not have a network of agents, with agents collaborating with other agents?”
Causa Prima’s agents can negotiate early-payment discounts based on the different working-capital needs of buyers and suppliers. A large company may earn a return by paying an invoice early in exchange for a discount, while the supplier receives cash sooner and potentially more cheaply than through external financing.
“There’s a win-win where the agents can find an equilibrium for both parties,” Ament said. Where the buyer cannot release cash early, Causa Prima plans to introduce third-party financing.
The company says it already has more than 3,000 active users, although it has not disclosed transaction volumes, customer numbers or revenues.
The system allows finance teams to set limits governing what agents can approve, including maximum invoice values and minimum acceptable returns. Transactions falling outside those parameters can be escalated to a person.
“If there’s a grey area, there’s a human in the loop,” Ament said.
Causa Prima’s longer-term bet is that fixed payment periods such as net 30, 60 or 90 days will become less relevant as agents negotiate terms for individual transactions in real time.
The company was founded by Ament, Henrik Gebbing and Philip Stanislaus. Ament previously co-founded supply-chain finance company Taulia, which was acquired by SAP, and tokenisation startup Centrifuge. Gebbing co-founded digital-asset custodian Finoa, while Stanislaus previously led enterprise security audits at Oak Security.
However, Causa Prima says it intends to operate as a neutral layer across different accounting and enterprise software systems, rather than attempting to replace them.
“We’ll integrate with SAP,” he said. “But you need to address any size of business, the large corporation, but also Jack the Plumber.”
The funding will be used to expand Causa Prima’s engineering and product teams. The company currently has around 11 employees in Madrid, focused on product, operations and go-to-market, with its engineering team being built in Munich.
Ament said he was having no problem attracting talent to Madrid: “10 years ago it was a bit challenging and tricky here, but things changed quite a lot. There's talent here, local talent, and we hired, or are about to hire quite a few of them. And it’s fucking easy these days to attract talent from all over Europe and the US to Madrid… It's a buzzing city, lot of startup stuff happening around it now.”
