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

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.