Causa Prima announced a $20 million seed round that closed in September to expand an agent-to-agent platform that resolves billing disputes and speeds payments between companies and their suppliers. The Delaware-based startup had previously raised $10 million in a pre-seed round, bringing its total funding to $30 million.
Base10 Partners led the seed, 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. Base10 general partner Rexhi Dollaku said in a written statement that “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.”
“The status quo today is that a lot of things are still somewhat manual,” cofounder Maex Ament said. “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.”
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.
Causa Prima’s approach to agent-to-agent payments
The company provides software that lets AI agents act on companies’ behalf and interact with agents at other firms to sort out payments and billing disputes. Causa Prima monetizes that gap by taking a cut whenever its agents successfully negotiate early payments between buyers and suppliers.
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: a 2025 report by research firm Ardent Partners found nearly half of accounts payable executives name slow invoice approvals as their biggest challenge, with processing taking more than eight days on average.
Founders and origins
Causa Prima was cofounded by German entrepreneurs Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing and Philip Stanislaus. Ament began his career as a software engineer at SAP, later worked at fintechs focused on accounts payable and receivable, and founded Taulia in 2009. In 2017 he shifted to blockchain with Centrifuge, a decentralized finance company that tokenizes and trades real-world assets. Gebbing left the corporate world in 2018 after three years as a senior associate at McKinsey & Co. to cofound Finoa, a fintech that helps businesses on-chain. The two met in Madrid nearly a decade ago while pitching earlier startups; local venture capitalists who passed on investing introduced them after noticing both were German founders married to Spanish women.
When Gebbing moved into a board role at Finoa to take some time off, he and Ament began sketching ideas around agentic AI and brought in Stanislaus, who had previously led engineering under Ament at Centrifuge, as chief technology officer. They founded Causa Prima early this year. The company name comes from the Latin term for “first cause,” reflecting Ament’s view that the root cause of many business problems is simply getting paid.
