Pliant raises $80M as Claude and ChatGPT get a way into its payments

Berlin fintech Pliant has raised an $80M Series C led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest, as Techmeme’s summary of The Next Web’s report put it, and says AI agents such as Claude and ChatGPT can now connect to its B2B payments platform.

Pliant announced the round on November 4, 2026, in a press release on its own site. Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures also took part.

What the money and the agent access cover

According to the company, the funds go to expansion in the United States and Canada, preparation for further international markets, and its AI roadmap. It says it doubled its business in each of the last three years and recently passed $100M in annual recurring revenue. It has more than 300 employees in eight offices.

On the product side, Pliant sells commercial card issuing, payment accounts, foreign exchange and spend management. Third-party agents, including Claude, ChatGPT and a company’s own automations, connect through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to build payment steps into other business processes. Pliant also runs its own agents for recurring finance work.

Pliant’s Pliant for Agents page lists the practical limits. Agents act under the role of a Pliant user, an admin switches the connector on for the team, and each person connects their own account. An agent can search transactions, attach receipts, update coding and adjust card controls. Every call is logged, and actions that change data need confirmation. The page also says agents cannot move money or issue cards today, and that agentic payments will add budgets, limits and a confirmation step. A command-line tool is in early access, and banks and platforms can offer a white-labeled MCP server.

A licence is the product being sold

Pliant says it issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries under a European e-money licence, and is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard. According to the release, EU cards come from Pliant Oy, supervised by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority. UK cards are issued by Transact Payments Limited, which the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission regulates, and the US is served through regulated partners.

The pitch rests on that regulatory layer. Vinoth Jayakumar, general partner at Seaya Nova, told The Next Web: “When agents move money, someone still has to be licensed, auditable and liable.” CEO and co-founder Malte Rau said in the release: “We built Pliant as an API-first, modular B2B payments platform from day one.”

Reading the bet against the market

The round is double the $40M Series B Pliant closed in April 2025, which led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest, according to coverage by Finextra and others. The funding history, together with a $100M revenue run rate, shows a company that grew on cards and treasury plumbing first and is now adding agents as another way to reach that plumbing, rather than rebuilding around them.

The Next Web places the move in a crowded field. It notes that Visa, BILL and Billtrust piloted AI agents paying supplier invoices in October, and that Ramp, a US corporate card rival, reached a $60bn valuation the same month. Those figures are the outlet’s, not Pliant’s.

The timing of the access is the cautious part. Today the connector reads data and proposes changes, with a human confirming anything financial. Letting agents spend money is described as a future step, which is also where the control questions get harder. Security vendors are already building for that gap; CrowdStrike’s AI kill switch cuts off rogue agents, though only at the gateway for now.

What is still unproven

Most claims here come from Pliant and its investors: the revenue milestone, the growth rate and the oversubscribed round have not been independently checked. The release does not give a valuation, or a date for when agents will be allowed to initiate payments. Customers listed include travel, insurance and AI-native companies, but none is named. Anyone wanting to try the connector needs a Pliant account, and Pliant currently operates in Europe, the UK and the US.