Startup Causa Prima raises $20 million to tackle billing disputes with AI agents

Funding round

Delaware-based startup 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 payments between companies and their suppliers. Base10 Partners led the round, with participation from QED Investors, FJ Labs, and existing investors Creandum, Kfund, and Borusan Ventures. The company declined to disclose its valuation.

Causa Prima was founded in 2026 by German entrepreneurs Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing, and Philip Stanislaus. It previously raised $10 million in a pre-seed round, bringing its total funding to $30 million.

Agent-to-agent payments

The company is building software that lets AI agents act on behalf of companies and negotiate directly with agents at other businesses, focusing on the handoff between one company's accounts payable and another's accounts receivable. Cofounder Maex Ament said much of the process remains manual today, and that what is needed is a network of agents connecting the two sides.

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

Founders' background

Ament began his career as a software engineer at SAP before moving to fintech companies focused on payables and receivables. He founded supply-chain finance and electronic invoicing company Taulia in 2009, then shifted to blockchain in 2017 with Centrifuge, a decentralized finance company that tokenizes real-world assets. Gebbing spent three years as a senior associate at McKinsey before cofounding fintech company Finoa in 2018. The two met in Madrid nearly a decade ago while pitching their earlier startups to local venture capitalists.

Causa Prima has 25 employees across offices in Madrid and Munich and plans to open a New York office as it expands into the United States. Stanislaus, who previously led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge, serves as chief technology officer. The company's 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.

Sources: Fortune · Techmeme