Cleavr Raises €1 Million Pre-Seed to Build AI Agent for Cash Collection

Key Takeaways

1. €1 million pre-seed raised by Paris-based Cleavr, an AI-powered accounts receivable (AR) automation startup founded in 2025
2. 5 investor groups backed the round including Kima Ventures, Better Angle, another.vc, Aonia Ventures, and Super Capital, alongside strategic business angels from Pennylane and Convelio
3. 94% of European companies report losing money monthly to unpaid invoices, yet legacy AR tools only automate roughly 20% of the collection process a gap Cleavr is targeting head-on
4. Cleavr clients already see a 37% average reduction in DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) within the first few weeks of deployment​

Quick Recap

French fintech startup Cleavr has officially closed a €1 million pre-seed funding round, announced on March 18, 2026, via LinkedIn posts from co-founders Baptiste Nassoy and Arthur Guerin, and subsequently covered by EU Startups, Tech.eu, Finextra, and TechFront 360. The Paris-based company, founded in 2025, is building what it calls “the first AI coworker that automatically collects your cash” connecting directly to a company’s ERP to autonomously manage the full collection cycle from Day 1 post-invoicing through to payment receipt, including disputes and legal escalation.

AI That Doesn’t Just Send Reminders It Actually Collects

Where legacy AR software stops at auto-sending the first email reminder, Cleavr’s AI goes several steps further across the entire collection workflow. The platform connects to a company’s invoicing tool or ERP in as little as 24 hours via 100+ accounting integrations, requiring no months-long onboarding. Once live, the AI handles multichannel follow-ups (email, SMS, AI voice calls), identifies the right contacts within debtor organizations (accounting team, CFO, N+1 managers), processes payment promises, manages reconciliation (lettrage), handles disputes, and intelligently escalates files to litigation when necessary all without requiring a human finance team member to intervene at every step.

According to CEO Baptiste Nassoy, the ambition is to give every business “the collection rigor of a large finance department” by automating 80% of tasks and guaranteeing 100% invoice follow-up, freeing human teams to focus only on the highest-complexity cases. The platform’s continuous learning capability means it adapts its timing and outreach channel to individual debtor behavior over time. For scale-ups one of Cleavr’s primary target segments the average DSO stands at 72 days, a metric the platform is built to compress dramatically.

The investor consortium is notably strategic: Raphaël Nahum (CFO of Pennylane) praised Cleavr as “the missing piece to fully digitise the accounts receivable of European companies,” while the round also includes Régis Samuel (CEO of MyUnisoft) and Olivier Brourhant (CEO of Mantu), whose operating expertise in French financial software directly de-risks the go-to-market.

France’s Late-Payment Crisis Creates the Perfect Storm for AR AI

Cleavr is entering the market at a structurally urgent moment. France has one of Europe’s most persistent late-payment problems: according to an OpinionWay study for GoCardless, 94% of French companies report losing money monthly to unpaid invoices, and 65% of business leaders expect the situation to worsen in 2026. This problem is endemic across Europe, where payment delays operate as a structural drag on SME cash flow.
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The broader European accounts receivable automation market generated USD 926.1 million in revenue in 2023 and is projected to grow to USD 2.07 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 12.2%. Critically, France is forecast to register the highest country-level CAGR in this market through 2030  making it the ideal launchpad for Cleavr’s European expansion ambitions. Globally, the AR automation market reached USD 3.84 billion in 2026 and is growing at 11.6% annually toward a projected USD 6.66 billion by 2031.

Regulatory tailwinds are also accelerating adoption. The EU’s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) directive will mandate real-time digital reporting across the bloc by 2030, forcing businesses to modernize their invoice-to-cash infrastructure. Cleavr’s timing places it ahead of a compliance-driven adoption wave. Comparable European rounds in the AR space including Paraglide (€4.2M), Donnerstag.ai (€4.3M), and Mimo (€7.7M) signal that investor appetite for AR fintech is accelerating, even if Cleavr’s raise is comparatively modest at this stage.

Competitive Landscape & Comparison

Cleavr’s most relevant direct competitors at a similar scale are Kolleno (London, UK) and Gaviti (Tel Aviv, Israel), both of which occupy the AI-powered SME accounts receivable automation space without the enterprise complexity of players like HighRadius or SAP.

Strategic Analysis

Cleavr leads in AI-native autonomy and time-to-value its 24-hour ERP setup, AI voice call capability, and success-fee pricing model lower the adoption barrier significantly compared to Kolleno and Gaviti’s traditional SaaS structures. However, Kolleno holds a clear edge in proven scale, enterprise G2 reputation (4.9), and global multi-market presence, making it the safer choice for larger finance teams today. Gaviti’s Series A funding and $6.2 billion in client-collected receivables in 2021 alone demonstrate deeper product-market fit at volume Cleavr must prove similar throughput as it scales.

Bayelsa Watch’s Takeaway

In my experience covering fintech funding rounds, the ones that stand out aren’t always the biggest they’re the ones solving a problem that’s both massive and annoyingly unsexy. Accounts receivable is exactly that kind of problem. I think this is a big deal because Cleavr isn’t just building another reminder bot; it’s going after the 80% of the collection process that legacy tools have always abandoned to human labor the disputes, the escalations, the right-contact-finding, the AI calls.
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I generally prefer startups that enter with a bold structural thesis rather than incremental feature improvements, and Cleavr’s “AI coworker” framing where the software doesn’t just automate tasks but reasons through them  puts it in a different category from what Kolleno or Gaviti started with. The success-fee pricing (10.8%) is a particularly clever wedge: it removes procurement friction for cash-strapped SMEs who would rather pay on results than commit to a subscription before trust is established.
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The round is bullish for European AR fintech broadly, and for France specifically, given its structural late-payment crisis and its forecast position as the fastest-growing AR automation market in Europe by 2030. The strategic angel lineup CFOs and CEOs of Pennylane, MyUnisoft, and Mantu tells me the founders have done their network work right. For a pre-seed team founded in 2025, landing Kima Ventures alongside a roster of operating executives is a genuine signal of validation, not just capital.

The real test will be whether Cleavr can compound its early DSO wins into referenceable enterprise case studies before better-funded competitors catch up on AI-native features. For now, I’m watching this one closely it has all the ingredients of a category defining fintech in the making.