The Berlin B2B payments fintech has doubled the size of its last round, with Seaya Nova and Speedinvest leading and a US bank it competes with in travel payments quietly joining the cap table. Its pitch to investors leans on AI agents, a product that is still in beta and does not yet move real money.
Berlin-based Pliant, which issues corporate cards and runs payment infrastructure for businesses, has raised $80m (about €71m) in a Series C round, twice the $40m it raised in its Series B in 2025. The round is led by Spanish growth investor Seaya Nova and Austria's Speedinvest, an existing backer that led the previous round, with Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures also taking part, the company said on Wednesday.
The more telling name is one Pliant left out of its announcement. According to Handelsblatt, which reported the deal ahead of the announcement, Citi Ventures, the corporate venture arm of US bank Citigroup, has invested for the first time. Pliant confirmed this to the paper. Handelsblatt notes that Citi and Pliant both operate in travel payments and sometimes compete there, and that, according to sources close to the bank, the fintech has recently been winning more often. The paper also reports that TV investor Carsten Maschmeyer's fund Alstin, an early backer, did not put in fresh money and is being diluted.
Growth, and an untested bet
Pliant says it has doubled its business in each of the last three years and recently passed $100m in annual recurring revenue. It employs more than 300 people across eight offices, is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, and issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries under its own European e-money licence and through regulated partners in the UK and US. Those figures are the company's own and have not been independently verified.
The money is earmarked for expansion in the US and Canada, entry into further markets and the company's AI roadmap. That roadmap is central to the pitch: Pliant wants assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude, or customers' own automations, to connect to its platform through the Model Context Protocol and trigger payments inside business workflows, with permissions and audit trails built in.
Börsen-Zeitung offered a reality check. The project is still in beta, and agents do not yet initiate real payments, the company told the paper (translated). Pliant also declined to give a valuation, saying only that it is above its Series B level. Including the new round, it has raised close to $200m in equity since it was founded in 2020 by Malte Rau and Fabian Terner. Its US team is still small, numbering in the mid-double digits, according to Börsen-Zeitung.
Why it matters
The round is one of the larger fintech raises in Germany this autumn, and it lands as European card and spend-management companies try to win share in North America against well-funded US rivals such as Ramp and Brex. A strategic stake from a global bank that is also a competitor suggests incumbents would rather watch, and possibly partner with, fast-growing challengers than fight them only on price.
The AI-agent angle is the bigger open question. Investors are clearly paying for the prospect that software agents will one day buy travel, pay suppliers and reconcile expenses on their own. For now, Pliant's growth comes from conventional corporate cards and white-label infrastructure for banks and fintechs. Whether agent-initiated payments become a real revenue line, and how regulators treat payments that no human approves, will decide whether that part of the story holds up.
