Cleavr Raises €8 Million to Expand Accounts Receivable Automation

Paris-based Cleavr has raised €8 million in a seed round led by Varsity to expand its accounts receivable automation platform across Europe, six months after closing a €1 million pre-seed round.

Existing investors Kima Ventures and Better Angle joined the round, alongside Portfolio Ventures, Kerala and Financière Saint James. Cleavr, founded in 2025, has now raised €9 million in total. It did not disclose a valuation.

The round matters to finance teams because it adds money to a category that is moving from reminder software to systems that run the whole collections cycle. Cleavr said it has more than 100 customers in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK, nearly double the roughly 50 it had at the time of the pre-seed in March. It said none has left.

Cleavr said the new money will fund product development, a larger sales team and growth across Europe.

What the accounts receivable automation platform does

Once an invoice is issued, Cleavr’s software identifies the right contact at the debtor and manages follow-up by email, phone or SMS. Its website also lists WhatsApp and voicemail, with reminders in French, English, Spanish and German.

The platform tracks payment commitments and escalates disputes. People step in only where a case needs them. A debtor portal lets customers pay, contest an invoice or ask for a payment schedule.

It connects to the ledgers finance teams already run. Listed integrations include Pennylane, Sage, SAP, NetSuite, Odoo, Xero, Sellsy, Axonaut, Stripe and Qonto. The company can build links to other systems on request.

Cleavr said customers cut days sales outstanding by an average of 37% within the first few weeks and collect 40% more cash. It said teams spend 80% less time chasing payments.

Named customers include Skello, Swile and Greenly. Cleavr said it processes several billion euros in invoices a year.

“Collections is a repetitive, unrewarding task that nobody wants to do,” said Baptiste Nassoy, co-founder and chief executive. “By delegating it to Cleavr, finance teams can focus on higher-value work.”

Nassoy founded the company with Arthur Guérin and Antoine Grenard. Guérin and Grenard, both co-founders, said Cleavr adapts to each organisation, ERP system and internal process within days, with no activation fees and no locked-in licences.

“What keeps customers is the cash coming in faster,” they said.

Cleavr sells by quotation and publishes no price list.

Why accounts receivable automation is drawing capital

The seed round is more than seven times the size of the pre-seed, led in March by Kima Ventures. Angels in that round included Raphaël Nahum, chief financial officer of Pennylane, and Régis Samuel, chief executive of MyUnisoft. Pennylane is both an integration partner and a customer.

The pitch is simple. Accounts receivable automation removes the manual chasing that sits between an issued invoice and cash in the bank. Cleavr says older tools automate about a fifth of the collections workflow. It says its platform handles up to 80%.

For a finance team, the case rests on working capital rather than headcount. A cut in days sales outstanding frees cash directly, and it does so without a new credit line.

The late payment problem behind the funding

European law sets the frame. The 2011 Late Payment Directive makes 30 days the default term between businesses. It allows 60 days or longer if the term is not grossly unfair to the creditor.

The European Commission proposed in September 2023 to replace the directive with a regulation. Under the proposal, payment terms would be capped at 30 days. Late-payment interest would be automatic, at 8 percentage points above the European Central Bank reference rate, and a creditor could not waive it.

The European Parliament adopted its position in 2024, with a carve-out allowing business-to-business terms to reach 60 days by agreement. The Council has not agreed a text, so the 2011 directive remains the operative law.

France already regulates terms more tightly. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code sets a 30-day default and caps agreed terms at 60 days from the invoice date, or 45 days from the end of the month if the contract says so. Sales conditions and invoices must state the late-payment penalty rate and the fixed recovery indemnity, which is €40 per invoice.

Those rules give French finance teams a legal basis to chase. They do not do the chasing. France also began phasing in mandatory electronic invoicing in September 2026, which puts invoice data into structured form that collections software can read.

The UK is moving too. The Commercial Payments Bill, now in the House of Lords, would cap terms at 60 days where large firms pay smaller suppliers. Cleavr counts UK customers among its 100.

Competition in accounts receivable automation

Cleavr is entering a crowded field. Upflow, Donnerstag.ai, Lunos AI and Chaser all sell collections tools in Europe. In the US, Fazeshift raised a $17 million Series A in May 2026 for AI agents covering cash application, collections and disputes.

The closest European comparison is Sweden’s Paraglide, which raised $5 million in January 2026 for agents that hold two-way exchanges with debtors. Accountio’s review of funded startups in the category counts at least $147 million committed across four of them before Cleavr’s round.

Larger rivals sit above them. HighRadius has raised $475 million and sells to enterprises. Accountio’s guide to accounts receivable automation software lists the incumbents whose ledger modules already include dunning.

That is Cleavr’s main exposure. If an accounting platform such as Pennylane builds invoice chasing into its own product, customers can get a basic version without a second vendor. Cleavr’s reply is depth: dispute handling, credit notes, tone adapted to each debtor, and phone calls placed by an AI agent that identifies itself as one.

What Cleavr does next with the money

Cleavr has said it wants to operate across Europe by the end of 2026. It is already selling in Germany, Italy and Spain, the three markets it named at the pre-seed stage.

The sales hires will show how far a company that has relied mostly on direct prospecting can scale. The next test is whether the 37% reduction in days sales outstanding holds as customers grow from the first few weeks to a full year on the platform.