Causa Prima Raises $20 Million Seed for AI Agents That Fix B2B Billing

Causa Prima has raised a $20 million seed round to build AI agents that negotiate billing disputes and early payments directly between companies — with no humans in the loop on either side. The Delaware-based startup announced the round, which closed in September, on Tuesday. It previously raised $10 million in a pre-seed round, bringing total funding to $30 million.

The company's platform lets AI agents act on companies' behalf, working together to sort out payments between businesses. Base10 Partners led the seed round, with participation from QED Investors, FJ Labs, and existing investors Creandum, Kfund, and Borusan Ventures. Causa Prima declined to disclose its valuation following the round.

"The status quo today is that a lot of things are still somewhat manual," cofounder Maex Ament told Fortune. "What we need is a network of agents, and… the area that felt natural to us was… accounts payable of one company and accounts receivable of another."

Base10 general partner Rexhi Dollaku framed the bet in a written statement to Fortune: "Every dollar going into [accounts payable and accounts receivable] automation today assumes the bottleneck sits inside one company. Causa Prima is building for the handoff between companies."

How big is the problem Causa Prima is attacking?

Payments between businesses total roughly $98 trillion a year, according to market research firm Fortune Business Insights. Mastercard estimates the broader market opportunity at $125 trillion. Much of that flow still moves slowly.

Nearly half of executives working in accounts payable name slow invoice approvals as their biggest challenge, according to a 2025 report by research firm Ardent Partners. Processing takes more than eight days on average, the report found.

Causa Prima monetizes that gap. It takes a cut whenever its agents successfully negotiate early payments between buyers and suppliers.

Who is behind the company?

Causa Prima counts 25 employees across offices in Madrid and Munich. The fresh capital will fund a New York office as the company expands into the United States.

The founding team pairs deep payments experience with crypto-industry credentials. Ament, German-born and German-raised, started as a software engineer at SAP SE. He later worked at fintech companies focused on accounts payable and receivable before founding Taulia in 2009, a supply chain finance and electronic invoicing specialist. In 2017 he pivoted to blockchain and founded Centrifuge, a decentralized finance company that tokenizes and trades real-world assets.

Cofounder Henrik Gebbing left McKinsey & Company in 2018 after three years as a senior associate to launch Finoa, a fintech that helps bring businesses on-chain. The third cofounder, Philip Stanislaus, previously led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge and now serves as chief technology officer.

Why did three fintech veterans team up now?

Ament and Gebbing met in Madrid nearly a decade ago while pitching their earlier startups to local venture capitalists. The VCs passed on both but introduced the pair after noticing two German founders married to Spanish women.

Friendship turned into a business partnership last year. Gebbing had moved into a board role at Finoa to take some time off. Instead of relaxing, he and Ament began sketching ideas around the emerging wave of agentic AI, and brought in Stanislaus.

The breakthrough came when they realized internal corporate AI agents were still getting stuck waiting days for humans to answer emails. They founded Causa Prima early this year. The name comes from the Latin term for "first cause" — a nod to Ament's philosophy that the root cause of all business is simply getting paid.

The bet now rests on whether companies will let autonomous agents talk to each other across corporate boundaries — and whether a cut of accelerated payments across a $98 trillion market can build a durable business.