German unicorn Personio acquires spend management platform Circula

HRTech unicorn Personio today announced it has acquired Circula, a German spend management platform, to reportedly become the first European platform to unite HR, payroll, and spend management.

This follows Circula’s €15 million Series A in 2025 – as covered by EU-Startups.

“Spend management is one of the capabilities our customers ask us for most, and it’s complex to get right in Europe. Just as with payroll rules change at every border. Over the past 9 years Circula has already solved that complexity in an intuitive and powerful way,” says Hanno Renner, CEO and co-founder of Personio. “With Circula joining Personio, everything a company spends on its people–payroll, expenses and benefits–comes together under one roof. That’s a first in Europe, and a big step towards Personio being the system European businesses run their entire workforce on.”

Today’s acquisition comes amid sustained investment in European HR, workforce-management and adjacent spend-management software during 2026.

EU-Startups has reported almost €500 million across a selection of relevant rounds this year, including €200 million for French frontline workforce platform Skello, €129 million for Barcelona-based HRTech company Factorial, €37 million for Amsterdam-based workforce compliance platform WorkFlex and €30 million for Berlin-based spend-management company Moss.

The latter provides a particularly close German comparison to Circula, combining corporate cards, invoices and reimbursements for SMEs while expanding into AI-powered finance tools.

“Circula has solved syncing employee data between spend management and HR platform and hundreds of joint customers already use that integration. The unsolved part is that the tax logic on the expense side and on the payroll side has always been built by two different companies,” says Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO and co-founder of Circula. “Joining forces with Personio today changes that. For our customers, DATEV stays, the existing integration stays, and expertise that Circula built stays. What changes is that HR, spend, and now payroll are designed to be one.”

Founded in Munich in 2015, Personio is an HR and payroll platform, used by more than 16,000 companies employing 1.6 million people. Today’s acquisition marks a new phase for the company as it shifts into spend management.

The two companies have already worked closely together for several years, serving many of Personio’s 16,000 European customers together.

The idea is for expenses to flow into payroll through both payroll integrations and Personio’s native payroll engine. Each company has built compliance and tax expertise in its own domain, Personio in payroll and Circula in expenses and benefits.

More than 3,000 European mid-market businesses already trust Circula with their expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable and tax-optimised benefits.

Beyond their joint customer-base and focus on small and mid-sized organisations, Circula and Personio are also united in their commitment to making the lives of tax advisors easier. Both companies have built up a community of hundreds of tax advisors and have built features that facilitate the collaboration of tax advisors with their clients.

One part of that strategy has been deep DATEV integrations which transfer data into DATEV’s payroll and accounting systems.They will continue to be further developed and will over time seamlessly integrate into a single solution.

Together, Personio and Circula aim to run all business spend – salary, benefits, expenses and corporate cards – in one integrated platform.

Circula will operate as Circula by Personio from October 6 and the team will join Personio. For joint customers the integration will deepen into a fully connected experience. For Circula customers that do not use Personio, the product will continue to be available and further developed as a standalone product.