Cleavr raises €8M seed from Varsity to automate Europe’s late invoice collection

Cleavr, a Paris-based startup, has raised an €8 million seed round led by Varsity to automate invoice collection. The company had closed a €1 million pre-seed round just six months earlier, and Kima Ventures plus Better Angle came back for this one too.

The pitch is simple enough: once an invoice goes unpaid, Cleavr’s software finds the right contacts, sends reminders by email, phone or SMS, tracks payment promises and handles disputes. If nobody answers, the AI looks for other people inside the customer’s company and says it is an AI agent when it calls. Humans step in only when needed.

Cleavr says the numbers are already moving. Customers have cut payment collection time by an average of 37%, reduced days sales outstanding by the same amount, collected 40% more cash and saved 80% of the time they used to spend on collections. The company also says none of its customers have left, and that it now serves more than 100 clients across France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK. That customer base has almost doubled since March.

Baptiste Nassoy, who previously worked as an analyst at Kima Ventures, founded Cleavr in 2025 with Arthur Guérin, formerly of Voodoo, and Antoine Grenard, who had worked at PwC. The company says it handles several billion euros of invoices each year, can onboard a new client in 48 hours and reaches return on investment within 96 hours. It plans to use the new cash to grow sales and keep building the product, with Europe still the target.

This is a crowded but still oddly manual market. Cleavr points to late payments as a major drag on French business, while saying older tools automate only around 20% of collections. Its own claim is much bolder: up to 80% automated. The real test is whether that holds up once the accounting platforms it plugs into decide to build the same feature themselves.