Causa Prima, a Delaware-based startup, has raised a $20 million seed round to build AI agents that settle billing disputes and speed up payments between companies and their suppliers. Base10 Partners led the round, which closed in September, with QED Investors, FJ Labs, Creandum, Kfund, and Borusan Ventures taking part. The company previously raised $10 million in pre-seed funding, bringing its total to $30 million. It declined to disclose its valuation. Causa Prima has 25 employees in Madrid and Munich. It plans to open a New York office as it expands into the United States. The company takes a cut whenever its agents successfully negotiate early payments between buyers and suppliers. Cofounders Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing, and Philip Stanislaus founded it earlier this year.

Causa Prima exits stealth with $10 million to build the first agent-to-agent AI network for B2B finance. Causa Prima, the agent-to-agent network for finance teams, led by Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing, and Philip Stanislaus, has raised a $10M pre-seed round led by Creandum, with participation from Kfund and HelloWorld, Angel Invest, alongside angel investors from Qonto, Pennylane, SAP, ING, SoFi, LIDL, and DeepMind. On its network, the approvals, disputes, and payment terms that used to bounce between humans and inboxes are handled between AI agents. Building the financial network for AI agents. As AI agents increasingly handle procurement, invoicing, and payments, enterprises are facing a new challenge: financial systems designed for human workflows are not built to operate at machine speed. Existing accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) platforms manage only one side of a transaction, leaving disputes, payment issues, and settlement negotiations dependent on manual intervention. Causa Prima addresses this gap by connecting buyers and suppliers on a shared network where AI agents can interact directly. Tasks that traditionally require lengthy coordination between AP and AR teams, such as resolving invoice disputes, can be handled automatically, reducing resolution times from weeks to seconds. The platform also enables companies to capture financial opportunities that have historically been difficult to manage at scale, including early-payment discounts across large supplier networks. Originally envisioned through the concept of dynamic discounting, the approach is now being applied across thousands of business relationships through automation. With more than 3,000 active users already on the platform, Causa Prima is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for AI-driven business transactions. Reimagining B2B finance for the agentic economy. According to Causa Prima, the biggest inefficiencies in B2B finance have historically existed not within individual companies, but in the interactions between buyers and suppliers. As AI agents begin negotiating and coordinating transactions in real time, many of the manual processes, payment disputes, and rigid settlement terms that have long characterized the industry could become increasingly automated. The company's vision is that enterprises will be able to resolve issues faster, optimize payment terms dynamically, and unlock financial value that is often lost through delays and operational friction. By enabling AI agents to transact directly across company boundaries, Causa Prima aims to transform B2B finance from a process driven by manual coordination into one powered by continuous, real-time optimization. Founded by leaders in enterprise finance and security. Causa Prima is founded by a team with deep experience building the financial and security infrastructure used by enterprises worldwide. The founding team brings expertise spanning payments, fintech, and enterprise security, with a track record of creating and scaling platforms that serve some of the world's largest organizations. Among the founders is Maex Ament, inventor of dynamic discounting, co-founder of Taulia, and a key contributor to SAP's payment infrastructure. He is joined by Henrik Gebbing, who helped scale fintech company Finoa to more than €10 billion in assets under management, and Philip Stanislaus, who led over 600 enterprise security audits during his time at Oak Security. Together, the team is applying decades of experience to build the infrastructure layer for AI-driven B2B transactions. Investor perspective on the future of B2B transactions. Investors see the rise of AI agents as a fundamental shift in how businesses transact with one another. As automated agents increasingly manage procurement, invoicing, and payments on both sides of a transaction, existing financial infrastructure, designed around human workflows, may struggle to meet the demands of a machine-speed economy. Supporters of Causa Prima believe the company's founding team is uniquely positioned to address this transition, given its experience building payment infrastructure used across global supplier networks. By enabling direct agent-to-agent interactions, the platform aims to automate payment negotiations, accelerate settlement processes, and make capabilities such as early-payment optimization a standard feature of B2B finance rather than a rarely captured opportunity. Rethinking payment terms for the AI economy. Causa Prima envisions a future where traditional payment terms such as net-30, net-60, and net-90 become increasingly obsolete. These fixed schedules emerged to accommodate the limitations of manual, human-driven financial processes rather than to optimize outcomes for buyers and suppliers. As AI agents begin managing transactions on both sides of the relationship, payment decisions can be negotiated and adjusted in real time. Instead of relying on predefined settlement windows, terms can become dynamic, allowing each transaction to be settled at the most appropriate time and under the most beneficial conditions for all parties involved. This shift has the potential to make B2B finance more efficient, flexible, and value-driven than the systems that have governed global commerce for decades.