Pliant, the Berlin-based B2B payments company, has raised an $80 million Series C to open its payment infrastructure to AI agents, the company announced on November 4. Seaya Nova and Speedinvest led the oversubscribed round, with participation from Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures.
The raise follows three consecutive years in which Pliant doubled its business. The company says it has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, employs more than 300 people across eight offices, and processes billions of dollars in annual payment volume for businesses and partners in Europe and North America. Pliant did not disclose a valuation.
The agent pitch is direct. Third-party agents, from assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to a company's own automations, can connect to Pliant through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and embed payment workflows into business processes. Pliant says agents get access to regulated payment infrastructure with permissions, controls and auditability built in.
Key facts
- 01Pliant raised an oversubscribed $80 million Series C led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest.
- 02Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures also joined the round.
- 03Pliant has passed $100 million in ARR after doubling its business three years in a row.
- 04AI agents including Claude and ChatGPT can connect to Pliant's payment infrastructure via Model Context Protocol.
- 05Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries and has more than 300 employees.
Pliant also runs its own AI agents inside the platform, which it says help customers automate recurring finance work at scale. The underlying product combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, foreign exchange and spend management in a single modular, API-first platform.
“We built Pliant as an API-first, modular B2B payments platform from day one, and we have adopted AI deeply, in our product and in how we run the company,”— Malte Rau, CEO and co-founder of Pliant
The licensing layer sits underneath all of it. Pliant is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard and issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries, under its European e-money license and through regulated partners in the UK and US. In the EU, its cards are issued by Pliant Oy, an e-money institution supervised by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority.
Seaya Nova general partner Vinoth Jayakumar framed the round around that regulated layer, arguing that each wave of software has made the application layer cheaper and the infrastructure underneath more valuable. Seaya Nova is backed by the European Investment Fund through the European Tech Champions Initiative.
“When agents move money, someone still has to be licensed, auditable and liable, and that is the layer Pliant owns.”— Vinoth Jayakumar, General Partner at Seaya Nova
Pliant's customers span travel, insurance, e-commerce and AI-native companies, along with banks, fintechs and software platforms that use its infrastructure to run their own commercial card offerings.
The new capital will fund expansion in the United States and Canada, preparation for entry into further international markets, and Pliant's AI roadmap, including deeper capabilities across agentic payments and workflows.
Pliant was founded in 2020 and is led by CEO and co-founder Malte Rau alongside co-founder Fabian Terner. Rau said the investment will help the company open more of its infrastructure directly to AI agents as it expands into new markets.
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