Personio Buys Berlin Spend Management Fintech Circula

Personio is adding spend management to its HR and payroll stack by buying Circula, the Berlin fintech that handles reimbursements, travel costs, corporate cards and employee benefits. It’s the biggest acquisition in Personio’s history, and neither company said what the deal cost.

The pitch is straightforward: one platform for salaries, benefits, expenses and cards. Personio says it already serves more than 16,000 companies with 1.6 million employees, while Circula counts more than 3,000 customers and about 250,000 users. Among those customers are Aston Martin, DATEV, Securitas and tonies.

This isn’t a cold surprise merger. The two companies have worked together for years and already share more than 500 customers, including Everphone, About You and Westwing. Employee data such as names, cost centers, bank details and approval workflows already moves from Personio into Circula, and both sides lean on tax advisers plus deep links to DATEV, the German accounting software that feeds expenses into payroll.

Personio’s bet is that Europe’s rules-heavy payroll market and its equally messy expense rules make a combined product hard to copy. Hanno Renner, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said spend management is one of the features customers ask for most often. Circula’s co-founder and chief executive, Nikolai Skatchkov, framed the deal as a fix for a long-standing split: payroll tax logic on one side, spend logic on the other.

Circula will become “Circula by Personio,” but the brand will stay alive. Customers who do not use Personio can still buy Circula as a stand-alone product, and it will keep being developed. For Personio, this is also acquisition number two this year, after the spring purchase of aurio, the Munich recruiting A.I. start-up, around the same time it reported its first profitable quarter.