Maex Ament has spent much of his career watching companies wrestle with invoice exceptions. Price mismatches. Missing purchase order numbers. Quantity discrepancies that trigger endless back-and-forth emails between accounting departments. The software industry has sold these companies countless tools to automate their internal processes, yet the friction persists.
Now Ament thinks he knows why. The problem was never really inside the company to begin with.
Causa Prima, the Madrid-based startup Ament co-founded, announced on October 13, 2026, that it closed a $20 million seed round, led by Base10 Partners. QED Investors, FJ Labs, Creandum, Kfund and Borusan Ventures participated in the round, which Fortune first reported. The funding brings the company's total capital raised to $30 million, coming less than four months after a $10 million pre-seed. Causa Prima declined to disclose its valuation.
The speed of the successive raises suggests investors see something in the company's central thesis: that the costliest inefficiencies in corporate finance happen not within the four walls of any single enterprise, but at the handoff point between buyer and supplier.
"Every dollar going into AP and AR automation today assumes the bottleneck sits inside one company," Rexhi Dollaku, general partner at Base10, told Fortune. "Causa Prima is building for the handoff between companies."
AI Agents That Negotiate With Each Other
Rather than selling accounts payable software to the buyer or accounts receivable tools to the supplier, Causa Prima deploys AI agents on both sides of a transaction. When an invoice triggers an exception, the buyer's agent and the supplier's agent attempt to resolve it together. They negotiate early-payment discounts, coordinate approved payments, and maintain audit trails within enterprise-defined policies, according to the company.
Causa Prima earns revenue by taking a percentage when its agents successfully broker early-payment agreements between buyers and suppliers, Fortune reported.
The company points to an anonymized case study on its website involving a European steel producer. After deploying Causa Prima's system, the manufacturer saw its touchless invoice processing rate climb from 34 percent to 86 percent. The company also captured €1.6 million in discounts and shortened payment cycles from 11 days down to two. In October LinkedIn posts, the founders said the network now serves more than 3,000 active accounts, including enterprises with multi-billion-dollar revenues, though this figure is self-reported and has not been independently verified.
Those metrics are difficult to verify independently, but they align with broader industry pain points. According to the Atradius Payment Practices Barometer, 43 percent of credit-based B2B sales in North America were overdue in 2025, though this data is now dated. Ardent Partners' latest AP metrics report found that the average invoice took 9.2 days to process. Fortune Business Insights estimated the global B2B payments market at $97.88 trillion in 2025, projecting growth to $109.39 trillion this year.
The Team Behind the Pitch
Ament is no stranger to the working capital management space. He built Taulia, a platform that SAP acquired a majority stake in during March 2022, and later co-founded Centrifuge, a tokenization and real-world-asset protocol, according to Fortune. Before that, he started his career at SAP building accounts-payable software.
Co-founder Henrik Gebbing previously co-founded Finoa, a BaFin-regulated crypto custodian that he said managed €10 billion in assets under custody and served more than 300 institutional clients, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before Finoa, Gebbing worked as a senior associate at McKinsey. He transitioned to a board role at the crypto firm more recently, though the exact timing is unclear.
The third co-founder, Philip Stanislaus, led more than 600 enterprise security audits at Oak Security and previously ran engineering under Ament at Centrifuge, TechFundingNews reported. Stanislaus, a University of Cambridge graduate, serves as managing director of the company's German subsidiary.
Next Stop: New York
Causa Prima plans to use the fresh capital to expand into the United States and open a New York office, Fortune reported. The 25-person team currently operates from Madrid and Munich. The company incorporated in Delaware as Causa Prima, Inc., with European operations conducted through Causa Prima Germany GmbH.
"Following the pre-seed into this round three months later reflects both the size of that problem and the pace at which the team is building," Dollaku told TechFundingNews.
The timing puts Causa Prima in a crowded moment for finance automation. Paris-based Cleavr raised a seed round for AR automation on October 6. Order-to-cash platform Stuut announced a Series B on October 7. But the agent-to-agent model represents a structural departure from tools that assume one side of the transaction holds all the leverage.
"The biggest inefficiency in corporate finance is no longer inside the company," Ament told TechFundingNews. "It is between companies. That is where the next generation of financial infrastructure will be built."
The startup is now hiring to staff its U.S. operations and onboarding enterprise customers. Whether the agent-to-agent approach can scale beyond early adopters remains to be seen, but the bet is that companies are tired of optimizing processes that still break down the moment an invoice crosses organizational boundaries.
