On 11 June, Pleo unveiled a suite of “agentic” AI tools that it says will help finance teams reduce administrative work. The software agents are designed to autonomously handle expense-policy checks, invoices, treasury monitoring and bookkeeping, escalating only the cases that need a human.
“Agentic AI gives finance leaders a clear path to free themselves from administrative tasks,” chief executive and co-founder Jeppe Rindom said. A beta is due in July.
Separately, Pleo recently cut around 50 roles, primarily across its engineering and data teams. Although reports of the layoffs surfaced shortly after the AI announcement, the workforce reduction had taken place earlier and was not directly tied to the launch of the new products.
What the agents do
The suite includes five specialised agents. The Policy Agent, which is already live, applies company spend rules in real time, flagging exceptions and directing approvals to the right person.
The AP Agent handles invoice processing end-to-end, from ingestion through email to payment tracking. A Treasury Agent monitors cash flow and tracks spend against budget, surfacing overspend risk before it materialises.
An Accounting Agent manages transaction coding, account reconciliation and book closing, escalating only items that need human review. Pleo is also releasing its own MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, an infrastructure layer that lets finance teams connect third-party AI tools, including ChatGPT Codex, Gemini and Copilot, directly to Pleo’s data environment.
The layoffs in context
The roughly 50 cuts fell on Pleo’s “Offering” teams, which span product, technology, design and data and employed about 300 people beforehand. Staff in Denmark, the UK and Germany were affected, some at senior level, as first reported by tech.eu.
The changes were “designed to strengthen focus, simplify decision-making, and accelerate product delivery for customers,” a spokesperson said, “while reflecting the increasing role of new technologies in how product and technology teams operate.”
This is Pleo’s third round of cuts since 2022. Last autumn’s roughly 100 redundancies fell on commercial and go-to-market staff, while a 2022 round took around 15 per cent of the workforce.
A leaner company in a tougher market
Pleo was valued at $4.7bn in late 2021 after raising $200m at the peak of the fintech boom. Last year, its backer Kinnevik wrote the stake down to an implied $1.62bn, about a third of that peak.
The competition is closing in. US spend-management leader Ramp bought Stockholm’s Billhop this year to enter Europe directly, in a market already bracing for consolidation.
Yet Pleo is not shrinking on every measure. Founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by Rindom and Niccolo Perra, the company still employs more than 800 people, says over 40,000 businesses use its tools, and reported 37 per cent revenue growth in 2024.
AI and the workforce question
The agents Pleo is selling target its customers’ finance staff, not its own engineers, so the launch did not literally replace the people it let go. The internal “new technologies” most likely refers to the AI coding tools now standard across software teams.
The pattern is familiar in 2026. GitLab restructured for the “agentic era,” while Meta, Oracle and Atlassian have all tied cuts to an AI build-out.
As Mark Zuckerberg told Meta staff, layoffs dressed as AI are often about cost underneath. The wider 2026 layoff wave has been justified by AI productivity that has not always materialised.
In Pleo’s case, the company says the two events are unrelated. The first test of the AI strategy will be whether the July beta lands on time, and whether the next set of accounts still shows growth.
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