This fintech configures expense cards to block misuse — and investors just backed it with millions
Miragec | Moment | Getty Images
A startup that uses technology to stop employees from abusing corporate expenses just raised 8 million euros ($8.6 million) of funding from investors, defying a slump in investment for the financial technology industry.
CleverCards, a Dublin-based firm, uses a digital platform linked to configurable expense cards to give companies control over how their employees use their corporate payment cards.
According to a 2016 global survey of CFOs by human resources firm Robert Half, employees have made several improper expense report requests including a doggie day spa, taxidermy services, dance classes, a side of beef and even a welder.
These requests, though odd, reflect a tough reality for many companies when it comes to corporate expenses: sometimes they can’t trust an employees’ judgment.
CleverCards CEO Kealan Lennon says his platform aims to tackle exactly that.
Rather than handing employees corporate credit cards they can go out and use for purchases anywhere in the world, CleverCards allows businesses to deliver prepaid cards that can be configured to only be used by certain members of staff and block certain transactions if they’re viewed as inappropriate.
“Businesses want to make sure the right employee is the one that gets the card, and that it’s only used for certain purposes,” Lennon told CNBC in an interview.
“It’s finance control,” he added. “The idea of a configurable payments platform hadn’t been done before. And by doing it digitally, that allowed customers come along and say, I want to be able to do this with the press of a button.”
CleverCards told CNBC exclusively Friday that it raised new funds in an investment round led by strategic investor Pluxee. The fresh investment takes the total money raised by CleverCards to date to over 28 million euros.
Pluxee is an employee vouchers and benefits platform that spun off from French food catering firm Sodexo earlier this year.
It is listed on the Euronext stock exchange in France with a valuation of 4 billion euros.
Taking business from Adyen, Stripe
Founded in 2019, CleverCards has signed up over 10,000 businesses as customers. It counts the likes of eBay, PaddyPower, Betfair, Accenture, Microsoft and Apple as clients.
Besides these businesses, CleverCard also works with public sector organizations.
In 2022, CleverCards partnered with the U.K. government to help release social welfare payments to people on smart meters who usually pay their bills through direct debit, but have been forced to seek additional financial help due to rising fuel prices. The cards could only be used to pay bills on select utility companies’ websites.
CleverCards deployed artificial intelligence to conduct identity verification checks on recipients, helping to avoid fraud, according to Lennon.
Lennon said that CleverCards’ funding round stood out in what has been a brutal market for dealmaking and fundraising in fintech.
“It is a tough environment,” he said. “In the current market logjam, it has been pretty impressive now to raise money because nobody’s raising capital.”
He said CleverCards is increasingly snatching business away from the likes of payment tech giants Adyen and Stripe.
“It’s been remarkable in that, as a smaller company, right, we were looking at the Stripes and Adyens and powering ahead,” he said, adding that, now, “we’ve won business against them.”
CleverCards will use the fresh funds to expand its business, scale its products and explore broader opportunities, it said.
In addition to the fundraise, CleverCards appointed five new non-executive directors to its board with experience in payments technology.
They include industry veterans Patrick Waldron, Donal Daly, Marc Frappier, Garry Lyons and Viktoria Otero del Val.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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