Cleavr Raises €1 Million to Bring AI to Accounts Receivable Automation

Cleavr, a Paris-based startup that built an AI system to chase unpaid invoices, raised €1 million in a seed round led by Kima Ventures to fund a push into European markets where late payments drain billions from small businesses each year.

A quarter of SME bankruptcies in France are directly linked to overdue invoices, according to Baptiste Nassoy, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Cleavr. The 94% of French companies that report losing money every month to late payments, a figure drawn from an OpinionWay survey commissioned by payment processor GoCardless and published in February, represent the market he is going after. The same survey found that 65% of business leaders expect the situation to get worse this year.

“Traditional tools cover maybe a fifth of the collection workflow,” Nassoy said. “We automate up to 80%.”

Nassoy is a graduate of NEOMA Business School who worked at Kima Ventures before co-founding Cleavr in 2025. His experience at the fund, which sees hundreds of startup pitches a month, gave him a close look at how early-stage companies struggle with cash flow. The receivables problem, he said, cuts across industries and company sizes.

The product works by connecting to a client’s existing enterprise resource planning system and accounting software. From there it operates autonomously. The AI identifies overdue invoices on the first day past the due date, contacts debtors through email, phone and SMS, and figures out the right person to talk to within the debtor’s organization, whether that is an accounts payable clerk, a department head or a finance director. It processes payment promises, reconciles incoming payments against the correct invoices, issues credit notes, manages disputes and escalates stubborn cases to legal recovery. When a situation calls for human judgment, the system hands the file back to the client’s finance team.

According to Cleavr, conventional receivables platforms automate roughly 20% of this process. Most rely on rigid reminder templates dispatched on fixed schedules. They send emails. They do not have conversations. The company’s AI adapts its timing, tone and channel based on how each debtor has responded in the past, and it learns as it goes. The platform can be deployed in days, Nassoy said, compared with the weeks or months that enterprise alternatives typically require.

Cleavr serves about 50 clients in France on a subscription model. Those clients have experienced a 37% reduction in days sales outstanding within the first weeks of use, according to the company. One saw an additional €100,000 in monthly cash inflows and eliminated dozens of hours of manual follow-up. For mid-market firms that operate with two or three people in finance, that kind of improvement in cash conversion can meaningfully reduce the need for short-term borrowing. The company declined to disclose revenue.

Kima Ventures, the prolific early-stage fund backed by French billionaire Xavier Niel, invests in two to three startups per week across dozens of countries. Better Angle also participated in the round, which included a portion of venture debt. The company did not break out the debt component.

The angel investors who backed the deal are notable for their proximity to the problem. Raphaël Nahum, the Chief Financial Officer of Pennylane, sees the receivables pain firsthand. Pennylane raised €175 million in January in a round led by TCV and Blackstone Growth, is valued at roughly $4.25 billion and serves more than 6,000 accounting firms and 800,000 business clients. From that vantage point, Nahum has a clear view of how French SMEs manage, or fail to manage, their collections.

“I chose to invest because the team succeeded where traditional tools fail: making collection intelligent and accessible to all companies, without mobilizing a dedicated team,” Nahum said.

Régis Samuel, CEO of cloud accounting platform MyUnisoft, and Olivier Brourhant, CEO of consulting firm Mantu, also invested.

The broader market context favors the company. Late payments contribute to roughly a quarter of all SME insolvencies across the eurozone, according to European Commission estimates, a figure that has barely moved in a decade despite repeated regulatory efforts to shorten payment terms. Collections remain one of the least digitized functions in finance. Even companies that have modernized payroll, procurement and invoicing still manage receivables through spreadsheets and manual outreach, creating a large pool of potential clients that have never used dedicated software for the task.

France is about to make that status quo harder to maintain. Mandatory electronic invoicing takes effect in September 2026, a reform that the government has been preparing for several years. A separate OpinionWay survey, conducted for document automation firm Quadient, found that 90% of French businesses are aware of the mandate but only 7% are fully compliant. The upgrade cycle that compliance will force could push thousands of companies to connect their ERP systems to outside software for the first time. For Cleavr, that is an opening.

The company is entering a competitive field. Malmö-based Paraglide raised €4.2 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and DN Capital for AI-powered receivables agents. Frankfurt-based Donnerstag.ai secured €4.3 million to expand across the German-speaking market. Milan-based Sibill closed a €12 million Series A for its SME finance platform. London-based Mimo raised €7.7 million for B2B payments and cash-flow tools. At the enterprise end, U.S.-based HighRadius serves large corporations at a price point and implementation complexity that mid-market European firms cannot absorb. Cleavr is going after the companies in between.

Nassoy founded the company in 2025 alongside two co-founders. All three are based in Paris. There are no other employees. The three planned hires will be its first. Prior to this round, the founders had built and deployed the product using their own resources. This is the company’s first outside capital.

With the new funding, Cleavr plans to begin selling in Germany, Italy and Spain. Nassoy said discussions in all three markets are advanced. Italy, which has among the longest average payment times in the eurozone, is a priority. Germany’s own digital invoicing mandate, expected in 2028, could open further demand. Spain, where SMEs account for a large share of economic output and face similar collection pressures, rounds out the initial list.

The goal is to be operating across Europe by the end of the year.