Pliant, a fintech company specialising in modular business-to-business (B2B) payment solutions, has raised $80 mn in a Series C funding round led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest.
Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures also participated in the investment, which will support Pliant’s expansion across the United States and Canada, preparations to enter additional international markets and development of its artificial intelligence capabilities.
- Pliant has raised $80 mn in a Series C round led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest, with backing from Illuminate Financial, Motive Partners and Molten Ventures.
- The funding follows three consecutive years of business doubling and comes after Pliant surpassed $100 mn in annual recurring revenue.
- The company plans to expand in the US and Canada while developing payment infrastructure that allows AI agents to execute financial workflows through MCP integrations.
The company is seeking to expand its role in business payments as organisations increasingly integrate AI agents into financial systems and automate payment-related workflows.
Funding follows three years of growth
The investment comes after three consecutive years in which Pliant doubled its business. The company also recently exceeded $100 mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Pliant 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.
Its customers include companies operating in travel, insurance, e-commerce and AI-native technology. The platform also serves banks, fintechs and software providers developing their own commercial payment products.
Pliant combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, foreign exchange (FX) and spend management within a modular platform. Its infrastructure allows financial institutions and software businesses to build payment services while supporting complex transaction workflows.
AI agents to gain broader access to payment infrastructure
A central part of Pliant’s development strategy involves allowing AI agents to interact directly with business payment systems.
The company’s own AI agents already support the automation of recurring financial tasks. External agents, including assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, can also connect to Pliant through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
The integration enables businesses to incorporate payment functions into automated processes using either third-party assistants or internally developed AI systems.
Pliant plans to use part of the new funding to expand these agent-based payment capabilities and develop additional automated financial workflows.
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
“Whether an established business wants AI to automate its payment processes with the right guardrails, or an AI-native company needs a licensed partner that moves as fast as it does, Pliant is built for that. This investment will help us take that foundation further, opening more of our infrastructure directly to AI agents and expanding into new markets as we build the payment platform for the next generation of businesses,” said Malte Rau.
Investors highlight the importance of regulated infrastructure
Vinoth Jayakumar, General Partner at Seaya Nova, said the growing use of AI in financial transactions increases the importance of the regulated infrastructure supporting those activities. “Every wave of software has made the application layer cheaper and the infrastructure underneath more valuable, and AI is no exception,” Jayakumar said.
When agents move money, someone still has to be licensed, auditable and liable, and that is the layer Pliant owns. Malte, Fabian and the team have built principal-member card issuing, payment accounts and FX into a single modular platform that businesses, banks and now AI agents can build on.
Vinoth Jayakumar, General Partner at Seaya Nova
Jayakumar added that Seaya Nova focuses on infrastructure businesses with network effects in regulated markets and intends to support Pliant’s expansion across North America and into additional markets.
Seaya Nova is backed by the European Investment Fund (EIF) through the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI), alongside other institutional investors.
The investment will allow Pliant to continue developing its existing payment services while expanding the infrastructure available to businesses, financial institutions and AI-driven applications.
