Pleo rolls out five AI agents to automate finance admin, beta in July

Pleo has unveiled five AI agents designed to take over routine finance tasks for its 40,000 business customers, with a beta due in July. The Copenhagen-based spend management firm says the tools mark a shift from dashboards that merely display data to software that acts on it, escalating only what genuinely needs a person's judgment.

The announcement lands at an awkward moment for Pleo. A day after the launch, reports emerged that the company had cut around 50 roles, mostly in engineering and data, as part of a wider restructuring of its product teams. Pleo says the two events are unconnected and that the cuts were decided before the AI rollout.

What the five agents do

The Policy Agent is already live. It checks spending against company rules in real time, flags anything out of line, and routes the request to whoever should approve it. The AP Agent takes over invoice handling, following a bill from when it lands in an inbox through to payment and tracking.

A Treasury Agent watches cash flow and spend against budget, aiming to surface the risk of overspending before it happens rather than after. An Accounting Agent codes transactions, reconciles accounts and helps close the books, again kicking only exceptions up to a human. The fifth piece, Pleo MCP, is still to come: it is meant to read card transactions, match them to receipts, write up memos, apply accounting codes and file expense claims without anyone touching a keyboard.

That last agent rides on a new Pleo MCP server, which effectively opens Pleo's spend data to outside AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Finance staff would be able to ask those assistants to pull spend figures, approve an expense or generate a report without leaving their usual chat window. Pleo frames this as a way to let customers use whichever AI tool they prefer while keeping their financial data inside Pleo's own controls.

Chief executive and co-founder Jeppe Rindom said the push is about giving finance teams back time currently lost to administration.

"Agentic AI gives finance leaders a clear path out of the admin and back to the work that requires their strategic judgment," Rindom said. "We're focused on unifying users' full financial ecosystem... while keeping data encrypted and controlled to move towards true autonomous spend."

Chief product and technology officer Marija Nakevska linked the launch to a decade of transaction data gathered from Pleo's customer base, which the company says has already shaped its expansion from expense cards into fuller cash management.

Why now

Pleo points to its own research to justify the timing: close to half of UK companies surveyed said their existing finance processes slow the business down, and most finance professionals expect a working knowledge of AI to become essential to the job even though they feel underprepared for it. That is the gap Pleo wants its agents to fill, turning approval queues and manual bookkeeping into background processes.

The product push also follows Pleo's October 2025 rollout of a cash management suite for UK and German customers, with multi-currency accounts and automated liquidity transfers. Agentic AI looks like the next step in the same strategy: turning a card-and-expenses tool into a platform that runs more of a finance department's plumbing.

A tougher backdrop

Pleo raised its last big round in December 2021, a $200m deal that valued it at $4.7bn. Its investor Kinnevik wrote that stake down last year to an implied $1.62bn, roughly a third of the 2021 peak, a sign of how far fintech valuations have cooled since the boom. The AI agents round out Pleo's third workforce reduction since 2022, after cuts to commercial teams last autumn and a roughly 15% headcount reduction in 2022.

Competition has also sharpened. Ramp, the US spend management firm, bought Stockholm's Billhop this year to establish a direct foothold in Europe, putting pressure on incumbents like Pleo in their home market. Pleo says it still employs more than 800 people and grew revenue 37% in 2024, numbers it will need to defend as rivals close in.

The real test starts in July, when the beta goes live. Whether the agents work reliably enough for finance teams to trust them with invoices and books, and whether that translates into renewed growth, is the question Pleo now has to answer with product rather than announcements.