An overdue invoice rarely stays a simple overdue invoice.
One customer promises to pay on Wednesday. Another says the amount is wrong. A third asks for three instalments. Someone else ignores email but answers the phone. Even after money arrives, the payment still has to be matched against the correct invoice and reflected in the accounting system.
Sending a reminder is the easy part. Deciding what should happen after the customer responds is where collections becomes operational work.
That distinction sits at the center of Cleavr’s approach to accounts receivable. The French fintech has raised €8 million in Seed funding led by Varsity, alongside Kima Ventures, Better Angle, 100IN, Portfolio Ventures, Kerala Ventures, Financière Saint James, Station F, Clover and business angels connected to companies including Datadog and Convelio. The round follows a €1 million pre-seed announced in March, taking Cleavr’s announced funding to €9 million.
The timing addresses a problem that is larger than software convenience. The EU Payment Observatory found that 52% of European companies reported difficulties caused by late payments in 2024, while suppliers reported an average B2B payment period of 60.3 days. Businesses were also spending an average 10.2 hours each week chasing customers for payment.
Cleavr is trying to automate more of that gap between invoice and cash.
Its workflow begins by connecting invoice data, customer information and payment history from existing finance systems. Cleavr can then send reminders, interpret customer responses and change the next action accordingly. A promise to pay can pause reminders until the agreed date; a dispute or request for instalments follows a different path; sensitive situations remain with the finance team. When payment arrives, the platform can match it back to the invoice, while discrepancies remain available for human review.
That is materially broader than traditional automated dunning, which mostly schedules another email when an invoice reaches a certain age. Cleavr’s current product surface spans multichannel reminders, recovery workflows, a debtor portal, international collection, AI-assisted calls, legal monitoring, analytics and payment reconciliation. It connects with tools including Pennylane, Stripe, Chargebee, NetSuite, SAP, Sellsy, HubSpot, Qonto, Odoo, Xero, Slack, Microsoft Teams and n8n, allowing finance teams to keep their existing billing, ERP and communication systems rather than rebuilding around a new stack.
The company is moving quickly for a business that says it launched only seven months ago. Cleavr reports more than 100 customers, operations across France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK, and several billion euros of invoices processed annually. It also says none of those first 100-plus customers has left. Those are company-reported traction figures rather than independently audited operating metrics, but they help explain why Varsity is backing the expansion.
Cleavr’s broader performance figures deserve the same boundary. The company reports an average 37% reduction in DSO, 40% more cash collected and an 80% reduction in the time teams spend on collection follow-ups during customers’ first months. Its own ROI calculator explicitly distinguishes assumptions from guarantees and points to individual customer outcomes rather than presenting every deployment as identical.
Some of those customer cases provide a more concrete picture. Greenly reports recovering more than €300,000 in three weeks from invoices already over 100 days overdue, while transport company Aït Transport says its average payment delay fell from 68 days to 41 days in three months, a 40% reduction. Both examples are published by Cleavr and should therefore be treated as customer case-study evidence, not independent benchmarking.
The customer base shown by Cleavr already stretches beyond one software niche, with companies including Greenly, Pennylane, Swile, Skello, Ramsay Santé, Morning and others appearing on its customer page. Its sector strategy similarly spans SaaS and subscription businesses, scale-ups, multi-entity groups, finance and services, healthcare and smaller companies.
Baptiste Nassoy, Cleavr’s co-founder and CEO, describes the basic proposition more simply: “Collections is a repetitive task that nobody wants to do.” The company’s bet is that AI can absorb much more than the repetition.
That will become the important test as Cleavr uses the new capital to expand across Europe and hire another 20 people across sales, product and technology. Automated reminders are relatively easy to scale. Handling disputed invoices, payment promises, different languages, changing regulations and customer relationships without constantly handing work back to humans is considerably harder.
If Cleavr can keep that decision layer reliable as its invoice volume and geographic reach increase, the product starts to look less like another collections tool and more like an operating layer sitting between revenue being booked and cash actually reaching the bank.
