Cleavr Raises €8 Million to Collect Europe’s Late Invoices

Paris fintech Cleavr has raised €8 million to automate invoice collection across Europe.

The seed, led by Varsity after a March 2026 pre-seed of €1 million, backs a product the company says cuts days sales outstanding by 37 percent in the first weeks.

More Than 100 Customers and a 37% DSO Cut

Cleavr, founded in 2025 by Baptiste Nassoy, Arthur Guérin and Antoine Grenard, now counts more than 100 customers in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom. That is roughly double the 50 French clients it cited when the pre-seed closed, and the company says none have left.

Nassoy, the chief executive and a former analyst at Kima Ventures, built the firm with Guérin, who had worked at game publisher Voodoo, and Grenard, who had worked at PwC. The three still run the Paris company from Annet-sur-Marne. On the day of the seed they said they were hiring 20 people in sales, product and tech.

The pitch is blunt. After an invoice goes out, software finds the right person at the debtor, follows up by email, phone, SMS or WhatsApp, logs payment promises, pauses on disputes and can escalate toward legal recovery. Humans step in when a case needs judgment. On voice calls, the system identifies itself as an AI agent, and if nobody answers it hunts for another contact.

WHAT CLEAVR SAYS CUSTOMERS GET

• More cash: Clients collect 40 percent more cash after going live, the company says.
• Less chasing: Finance teams spend 80 percent less time on follow-ups, per the same figures.
• Time to cash: The product is live in 24 hours, with a first payment claimed inside 96 hours.
• Invoice volume: Cleavr says it already handles several billion euros of invoices a year.

Those percentages are the company’s own. Independent audits of the book have not been published. What is public is a named result: Mathieu Vegreville, a Greenly co-founder, said the climate-tech firm recovered €100,000 in the first month.

Large Buyers Still Pay After the Legal Limit

The raise is small next to enterprise collections suites. The market it is chasing is not. Late payment in Europe is a standing transfer of cash from suppliers to buyers, and the official numbers have barely moved even as Brussels has written rules against it.

The EU Payment Observatory’s 2025 annual report, using 2024 data, found that 52 percent of European companies had problems because of late payments, five points more than in 2023 and ten points more than in 2021. Average payment periods sat at 60.3 days between businesses and 69.8 days when the debtor was a public body, 9.5 days slower. In 16 of 20 member states with a size split, large companies were the slower payers. Micro firms were the most punctual in 13 of those 20.

France’s own watchdog tells the same story from the supplier’s side of the ledger. The Observatoire des délais de paiement, in its 2025 report drawn from Banque de France data, said that without delays, SMEs and microenterprises would have had €13 billion of extra cash in 2024, €4 billion for micro firms and €9 billion for other SMEs. More than half of large French companies still paid suppliers after the 60-day legal cap. By the end of 2025, average French delays sat at 13.4 days, a touch above the European mean, even after customer and supplier delays each shortened by 1.5 days in 2024.

WHERE THE CASH IS PARKED

Directive 2011/7/EU already set a normal 30-day term for business deals, with room to stretch to 60. The rule did not stop large buyers from treating the invoice as cheap credit. Nassoy has said overdue invoices are tied to a quarter of SME bankruptcies in France. If a 37 percent DSO cut is real, the loser is not a spreadsheet. It is the buyer that had been sitting on the money.

How the Agent Chases an Overdue Invoice

Cleavr’s site connects to existing ERP systems and, the founders say, starts chasing the next day. The stack is built to run the whole cycle rather than fire a reminder email on a timer, which Nassoy has called about a fifth of the job.

WHAT THE SOFTWARE TAKES ON

• Channels: Email, SMS, voicemail, WhatsApp and automated phone reminders, in French, English, Spanish and German.
• Judgment: It reads replies, tags a promise to pay, a dispute or a request for a plan, then follows up, pauses or proposes terms.
• Money in: A debtor portal for one-click payment, matching of cash to invoices, and credit notes.
• Escalation: Workflows that move from friendly to firm to pre-legal to legal, plus Chorus Pro deposits for French public invoices.

The company sells speed against the old enterprise install. No activation fees, no locked-in licences, ISO 27001, data hosted in the EU. Guérin and Grenard put the commercial hook in one line: customers stay because cash arrives faster, not because a contract traps them.

€100K recovered in the first month.

Mathieu Vegreville, co-founder, Greenly

Vegreville also said reminders now go out in every country, in every language, and reach the right person. Victor, chief operating officer at Scalability, said the firm spent less time on reminders and saw customers pay sooner, and had not expected both at once. That pairing is the product claim in plain speech: fewer hours in the finance team, and a shorter wait for the transfer.

Varsity Leads an €8 Million Seed

Varsity led the new round. Kima Ventures and Better Angle, both back from the pre-seed, joined Portfolio Ventures, Kerala Ventures, Financière Saint James, 100IN, Station F and Clover, with angels from Datadog and Convelio. Combined with the March cheque, Cleavr has raised €9 million. Kima is Xavier Niel’s early-stage vehicle. Kerala was an early backer of Doctolib and Malt. Financière Saint James is the family office of Michaël Benabou, co-founder of Vente-Privée. Varsity, set up in 2023 by Didier Valet, a former deputy chief executive of Société Générale, had announced a first close of €70 million.

The company posted the round on X the same morning, listing the six live markets and the 20 open roles.

🚀 Big milestone! We just raised a €8M seed round.

We launched Cleavr with a simple conviction: companies should get paid on time, without spending their days chasing invoices.

For our customers, getting paid is not an admin task. It pays salaries, covers operating costs and… pic.twitter.com/WY1FOgaHVv

— CLEAVR (@CleavrHQ) October 6, 2026

THE MONEY AND THE MILESTONES

1. 2025: Nassoy, Guérin and Grenard found Cleavr in Paris and ship the first collections agent on their own cash.
2. March 19, 2026: A €1 million pre-seed closes with Kima Ventures, Better Angle, another.vc, Aonia Ventures, Super Capital and angels including Raphaël Nahum, then Pennylane’s finance chief, Régis Samuel of MyUnisoft and Olivier Brourhant of Mantu.
3. September 1, 2026: France’s e-invoicing duty goes live for large and mid-sized issuers, and every VAT-registered firm must be able to receive e-invoices.
4. October 6, 2026: Varsity leads an €8 million seed. Cleavr says it will spend the money on product work, a larger sales team and a wider European push.

Valet framed the cheque as a vote on a market that still runs on people and inboxes.

We were impressed by the vision and execution capability of the Cleavr team. In just a few months, they have won over a hundred companies of all sizes, all of which confirm the solution’s impact on their cash flow. The collections market is huge and still very little automated, and Cleavr’s agentic approach has everything it takes to create a new standard of autonomous financial management.

Didier Valet, general partner, Varsity

Nassoy’s own line is shorter. Collections, he said, is a repetitive, unrewarding task that nobody wants to do, and finance teams should hand it over so they can do higher-value work. The seed has to prove that an agent can hold a relationship that a person used to hold, including the awkward call, without burning the account.

Other Collections Startups Already Raised

Cleavr is late to a crowded shelf and early to a specific slice of it: mid-market European firms that will not buy a year-long HighRadius project. France already had Upflow, which took a $15 million Series A in 2021. Sweden’s Paraglide raised €4.2 million in January 2026 for receivables agents. Frankfurt’s Donnerstag.ai raised €4.3 million in November 2025. New York’s Lunos AI raised $5 million in September 2025. Sidetrade, listed in Paris, and UK-based Chaser sit further up or beside that stack, one selling network-trained credit scoring, the other selling reminder sequences that try not to sound like a debt shop.

RECENT CHEQUES IN THE SAME JOB

Nassoy’s distinction is coverage. Older tools, he said, automate maybe a fifth of the workflow, mostly scheduled mail. Cleavr claims up to 80 percent, including the conversation after the reminder. That is the whole argument against a cheaper dunning plug-in. It is also the claim rivals will copy first.

France’s E-Invoicing Mandate Is Already Live

The calendar around the seed is not accidental. From 1 September 2026, large companies and mid-sized firms in France must issue e-invoices, and every VAT-registered business must be able to receive structured electronic invoices through an approved platform. SMEs and micro firms have until 1 September 2027 to start issuing. The tax authority has said it will go easy on good-faith misses through the end of 2026, but the pipes are in.

Once invoices move as data through a plateforme agréée, a collections agent has a cleaner feed than a PDF sitting in someone’s inbox. Cleavr already talks up Chorus Pro for public-sector deposits. The same reform that forces French firms to modernise billing also lowers the cost of plugging a chaser into the stack. Germany’s own digital invoicing track, still years out, is the next version of that door.

Italy remains the expansion prize on payment culture. It has long sat at the slow end of European cycles, which is why Nassoy flagged it as a priority when the pre-seed landed. Spain and Germany were on that first list too. The seed now has to turn those conversations into the same 24-hour install the French book already uses.

Accounting Suites Could Build the Same Layer

The threat that does not show up in a competitor table is the ledger Cleavr plugs into. Pennylane’s then finance chief, Raphaël Nahum, put personal money into the pre-seed and later said the team had made collection intelligent without a dedicated staff. Pennylane already sits inside hundreds of thousands of French businesses. If that suite, or MyUnisoft, or a German ERP, ships a good-enough chaser, the standalone agent becomes a feature.

Cleavr’s answer is switching cost of a different kind. Guérin and Grenard said the era of traditional SaaS is over, that the product adapts to each organisation, each ERP and each internal process within days, and that what keeps customers is cash coming in faster. Zero churn on a 100-plus book is the early proof they want investors to hold. It is a short history. A collections bot that nags the wrong person, or that escalates a friendly late payer into a fight, can unwind that book as fast as a 96-hour win built it.

The 20 hires are the tell. Product still needs to get better at disputes and cross-border tone. Sales still has to walk into finance teams that have lived with late cash as a fact of European trade. If the agent works, DSO falls and the €13 billion float starts to move. If it does not, Europe keeps the same unpaid invoices, and the seed becomes another reminder tool with a nicer voice.