Cleavr raises €8M Seed to automate B2B invoice collection with AI agents

Cleavr (Paris) has raised €8 million in a Seed round led by Varsity, with Kima Ventures, Better Angle, Portfolio Ventures, Kerala, and Financière Saint James participating. The company was founded in 2025 by Baptiste Nassoy (CEO), Arthur Guérin (CTO), and Antoine Grenard — and had previously raised a €1M pre-seed in March 2026.

The DSO problem AI is being asked to solve

B2B invoice payment runs late. The structural cause is asymmetric information and asymmetric leverage: a large corporate buyer knows it controls future purchase orders; a smaller supplier knows it cannot afford to litigate every late payment. The result is a float that the buyer captures and the supplier funds. Manual accounts-receivable processes — phone calls, email reminders, escalation to finance directors — are both expensive and inconsistent: collections performance varies with the individual doing the chasing.

Cleavr's platform replaces that manual loop with AI agents that identify the right payment contact inside a buyer's organisation, dispatch reminders across email, phone, and SMS on a configured schedule, track payment commitments, and escalate disputes automatically when commitments are broken. The company-reported outcome — customers reducing DSO by 37% within the first weeks of use — is plausible as an order of magnitude given the baseline variability in manual collections, but has not been independently verified; the figure should be read as a directional claim, not a benchmark.

Varsity's cross-sector bet

Varsity previously backed Bohr Energie, a French hydrogen-storage Series A — an infrastructure play in a sector with entirely different dynamics. The Cleavr investment signals a widening of scope toward fintech enterprise software, a segment that has historically produced French champions (Kyriba, Qonto, Pennylane share DNA with the problem Cleavr is solving, even where the business models diverge).

Kima Ventures brings its characteristic portfolio breadth. The firm has backed Netsec (SME managed security, €8.9M) and Laboratoires üma (perimenopause supplements, €4M) in this archive — neither of which shares a sector with Cleavr. Kima's value at this stage is network and iteration speed rather than vertical expertise.

What the Seed funds

The €8M will extend the sales team and deepen the product ahead of a European expansion push. The product challenge at scale is complexity: SME customers have simple, uniform invoice processes; mid-market and enterprise customers have multi-system ERP environments, partially automated AP workflows on the buyer side, and disputes with contractual complexity that automated reminders alone will not resolve. The 18-month test is whether Cleavr's agents can navigate that complexity — or whether the SME market is the durable ceiling.