Causa Prima raised $30M to let AI agents haggle payments between companies

Agent-to-agent software: one company's accounts-payable AI negotiates billing disputes and early-payment terms directly with its supplier's agent.

That businesses will let AI agents negotiate with each other over invoices — and pay Causa Prima a cut of the early payments those agents strike.

$30M total: a $10M pre-seed, then a $20M seed closed September 2026, led by Base10 Partners

Maex Ament — SAP software engineer, then founder of supply-chain-finance firm Taulia in 2009, then DeFi company Centrifuge in 2017 — and Henrik Gebbing, a former McKinsey associate who co-founded fintech Finoa in 2018, met in Madrid a decade ago while pitching their startups to local VCs who passed on both but introduced them. In 2025, Gebbing moved into a board role at Finoa; instead of resting, he and Ament sketched agentic-AI ideas and saw that corporate AI agents were getting stuck waiting days for humans to answer emails. They founded Causa Prima in early 2026 with Philip Stanislaus, who had led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge, naming it after Ament's philosophy that the root cause of all business is getting paid.

Raised a $10M pre-seed, then a $20M seed that closed in September 2026, led by Base10 Partners with QED Investors, FJ Labs and existing investors Creandum, Kfund and Borusan Ventures; valuation undisclosed. 25 employees across Madrid and Munich, with the round earmarked for a New York office as it expands into the United States.

Its founders watched corporate AI agents stall internally for days waiting on human email replies, and concluded the bottleneck is the handoff between companies.

B2B payments total roughly $98 trillion a year, yet invoice approvals are still largely manual and average more than eight days.

The founding team has run this exact territory before: Taulia in supply-chain finance, Centrifuge in trade finance tokenization.

It prices on outcomes — a cut of early payments its agents actually negotiate — rather than seats or subscriptions.

Base10's thesis is that existing AP/AR automation assumes the bottleneck sits inside one company; Causa Prima builds for the space between two.

Enterprises are automating inside their own walls first; the next wedge is the handoff between companies, where two systems must negotiate what humans used to settle by email.

As of the October 13, 2026 announcement, the seed had closed in September, the company counted 25 employees across Madrid and Munich, and the round was earmarked for a New York office to drive US expansion. The platform's monetization — a cut of negotiated early payments — was described as its model, with no customer counts disclosed.