Cleavr Raises €8M for AI Invoice Collection in Europe

Cleavr has raised an €8M Seed round to expand its AI-powered accounts-receivable platform across Europe. Varsity led the financing, while Kima Ventures, Better Angle, 100IN, Portfolio Ventures, Kerala Ventures, Financière Saint James, Station F, Clover, and business angels also participated.

The round arrives six months after a €1M pre-seed and brings Cleavr's verified venture funding to €9M. The company is attacking a working-capital problem that can hide behind healthy sales numbers: revenue has little operating value until the invoice is collected, matched, and available to pay the next obligation.

Cleavr says more than 100 companies adopted its system during its first seven months, with zero churn, activity across six European markets, and several billion euros of invoices processed annually. Those figures are company-reported rather than independently audited, but they explain why investors are funding a faster European expansion.

What Cleavr Raised

The €8M Seed round was announced on October 6, 2026. At the European Central Bank's reference rate for that day, the financing was worth approximately $9.0M, though euros remain the transaction currency and the clearer way to describe the deal.

Varsity led the round. Existing investors Kima Ventures and Better Angle returned alongside 100IN, Portfolio Ventures, Kerala Ventures, Financière Saint James, Station F, Clover, and business angels associated with Datadog and Convelio. Cleavr did not disclose its valuation or the individual check sizes.

Cleavr's prior €1M pre-seed included Kima Ventures, Better Angle, another.vc, Aonia Ventures, Super Capital, and business angels from companies including Pennylane, MyUnisoft, and Convelio. The two disclosed rounds produce a €9M funding total, not an €8M lifetime total.

The new capital will support European expansion, commercial hiring, and product development. Cleavr also plans to hire 20 people across sales, product, and technology as it moves beyond France into Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

How Cleavr Automates Invoice Collection

Cleavr was founded in 2025 by Baptiste Nassoy, Arthur Guerin, and Antoine Grenard. Nassoy is the company's CEO, while all three founders are involved in building a system meant to replace repetitive collection work with an AI-driven workflow.

The Cleavr product connects to ERP, accounting, billing, CRM, and workflow systems. It gathers invoice and debtor context, identifies the appropriate contact, sends reminders through channels such as email, phone, and SMS, interprets replies, records payment promises, surfaces disputes, supports escalation, and reconciles money received with the correct invoice.

That scope separates the product from software that only displays an aging balance or automates an initial reminder. A late invoice can involve a changed contact, missing purchase order, disputed line item, installment request, legal escalation, or payment that arrived without enough information to match it. Cleavr is trying to carry the routine work through those handoffs and return sensitive exceptions to a human finance team.

The company says it can deploy within 24 hours and adapt to different ERP systems and internal processes. Its FAQ and security material also states that customer data is hosted in the European Union, with GDPR controls and ISO 27001:2022 certification.

The Working-Capital Case Behind the Round

Accounts receivable sits between a company's commercial success and its ability to operate. A signed contract can increase bookings, an issued invoice can increase reported revenue, and neither event pays employees or suppliers until the customer transfers the money.

Late payment also shifts financing pressure along the supply chain. The European Commission has said late commercial payments account for one in four bankruptcies in the European Union, while its underlying impact assessment cautions that country evidence and methodology vary. The direction is still clear: slower collection increases liquidity risk, financing costs, and administrative work, especially for smaller suppliers.

Cleavr reports that customers reduce days sales outstanding by an average of 37%, collect 40% more cash, and recover 80% of the time previously spent on reminders. It also says Greenly collected €300K in three weeks on invoices more than 100 days old. These are Cleavr's own performance claims, so they should be read as early commercial evidence rather than audited benchmarks.

The metrics are useful because they put the product against the correct scoreboard. Finance teams do not buy collections software for a more attractive dashboard; they buy it to release cash sooner, reduce repetitive work, and intervene before a manageable delay becomes a damaged customer relationship or a legal file.

Why European Expansion Is the Hard Part

Cleavr has moved quickly into six European markets, but collections does not become uniform when software crosses a border. Language, payment behavior, invoice rules, ERP stacks, customer expectations, and escalation practices all change, while the system still needs enough context to choose the right contact, message, timing, and next action.

That creates an operating burden and a product opportunity. A platform that can localize the routine work without losing financial control could give a regional company one collections process across multiple entities. A system that misreads a dispute or pushes the wrong customer too aggressively can turn an automation gain into a commercial problem.

Cleavr's model preserves a human role around sensitive situations. The meaningful shift is not removing finance professionals from collections; it is moving their attention away from every reminder and toward the cases where judgment, negotiation, or escalation determines the outcome.

What the €8M Must Demonstrate

The Seed round finances a transition from rapid early adoption to durable financial infrastructure. Cleavr must prove that its company-reported DSO, cash, time-saved, and retention results hold across longer customer histories, larger invoice portfolios, more languages, and more complicated disputes.

It also has to earn a specific kind of trust. Accounts-receivable software touches customer data, cash timing, legal escalation, and the relationship between sales and finance. Reliability therefore includes more than model accuracy; it includes auditability, security, workflow control, and the ability to stop when the context belongs with a person.

Cleavr's first seven months suggest that finance teams are ready to delegate more of the collection process. The next phase will show whether the company can turn that urgency into a European operating layer that gets invoices paid faster without treating every debtor, market, or exception as the same problem.