Pliant

Pliant sells a corporate credit card, but that description undersells what the company actually built. Founded in Berlin in 2020 by Malte Rau and Fabian Terner, two operators who cut their teeth at the German lending fintech Lendico, Pliant set out to solve a trade-off that finance teams had learned to live with: a card could be flexible, or it could integrate cleanly with the systems a company already ran, but rarely both.

Its answer was to treat the card as software. Through a set of apps and an API-first platform, Pliant lets companies issue physical and virtual cards, set real-time spend controls, capture receipts automatically, and push every transaction straight into accounting tools like DATEV, Oracle NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics. The card runs on the Visa network across more than 30 countries and 11 currencies.

The detail that tends to convince finance leaders is quieter than the feature list. A Pliant card can be used from any bank account, independent of a company's house bank. That means adopting it does not require a banking migration - the kind of project that stalls procurement for a year. Lowering that switching cost is part of why the platform now serves more than 3,500 businesses.

Then there is the part of Pliant that other companies build on. Its cards-as-a-service model lets a bank or a software platform launch its own branded credit card program on Pliant's rails, without becoming a licensed card issuer itself. For the partner, that opens a new revenue line and a reason for customers to stay. More than 20 partner platforms now run programs this way, and in 2024 Commerzbank chose Pliant to power a fully digital credit card for its business customers.

Who uses all this? Corporate travel managers who need single-use virtual cards and automatic CO2 neutralization on trips. Fleet operators. Banks looking to modernize card programs without a multi-year build. Software companies embedding payments into their own products. Circula and Candis, two spend-management tools, have cited fast-growing card volume routed through the platform.

The competitive frame is usually Ramp and Brex in the US, and Pleo, Moss, Spendesk and Payhawk in Europe. Pliant competes on a different axis than most of them. Rather than lead with a polished spend-management app aimed at end users, it leads with infrastructure - white-label issuing, deep European accounting integrations, and an API that a developer can wire into an existing finance stack. In a market crowded with card apps, Pliant is trying to be the layer underneath them.

That positioning is expensive to prove. Pliant carries a licensed EU e-money institution, holds PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO/IEC 27001 certifications, and has raised more than $100 million across four rounds. In 2025 it closed a $40M Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest, with PayPal Ventures and Motive Ventures returning, and used it to open a US front - launching card issuance across all 50 states through a sponsorship with Coastal Community Bank. CEO Malte Rau relocated from Berlin to New York to run the expansion himself.