Artificial intelligence is becoming a fixture in the workplace. Soon, many firms will have agents that don’t just operate within a business—but also interact with agents at other companies. One startup is trying to jump-start that future with software that lets AI agents act on companies’ behalf, working together to sort out payments between businesses.
On Tuesday, Delaware-based Causa Prima announced a $20 million seed round that closed in September to expand its agent-to-agent platform, which resolves billing disputes and speeds up payment times between companies and their suppliers. Cofounded by German entrepreneurs Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing, and Philip Stanislaus, the company previously raised $10 million in a pre-seed round, bringing its total funding to $30 million.
“The status quo today is that a lot of things are still somewhat manual,” 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 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.
“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,” Base10 general partner Rexhi Dollaku told Fortune in a written statement.
Causa Prima has 25 employees across offices in Madrid and Munich and plans to use the funding to open a New York office as it expands into the United States.
Payments between businesses total roughly $98 trillion a year, according to market research firm Fortune Business Insights, while Mastercard estimates the broader market opportunity at $125 trillion. Manual approvals can delay those payments. Nearly half of executives working in accounts payable name slow invoice approvals as their biggest challenge, with processing taking more than eight days on average, according to a 2025 report by research firm Ardent Partners.
Causes Prima monetizes that gap by taking a cut whenever its agents successfully negotiate early payments between buyers and suppliers.
Friends to founders
Ament isn’t new to the payments industry. Born and raised in Germany, he began his career as a software engineer at SAP SE, a German multinational whose software helps businesses manage finances and supply chains. He later worked at fintech companies focused on accounts payable and receivable before founding Taulia in 2009, a company specializing in supply chain finance and electronic invoicing. In 2017, Ament shifted his focus from traditional fintech to blockchain and founded Centrifuge, a decentralized finance company that tokenizes and trades real-world assets.
Gebbing also left the corporate world in 2018 after three years as a senior associate at consulting firm McKinsey & Company to cofound Finoa, a fintech company that helps bring businesses on-chain.
The two met in Madrid nearly a decade ago while pitching their earlier startups to local venture capitalists, who passed on investing but introduced them after noticing both were German founders married to Spanish women.
Years of friendship turned into a business partnership last year when Gebbing moved into a board role at Finoa to take some time off. Instead of relaxing, he and Ament began sketching out ideas around the emerging wave of agentic AI. They brought in Stanislaus, who had previously led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge, as chief technology officer.
While brainstorming, the three realized that internal corporate AI agents were still getting stuck waiting days for humans to answer emails, prompting them to found Causa Prima early this year. They drew the company’s name from the Latin term for “first cause,” a nod to Ament’s philosophy that the root cause of all business is simply getting paid.