Learnings from Taulia
At a Taulia user conference in 2016, a woman who ran a cleaning company made me rethink everything we had built.
The panel was unscripted — suppliers talking about the pros and cons of working with us. A woman who ran a small company cleaning Publix stores told the room that without Taulia getting her invoices paid faster, she could not have made payroll.
Looking back, that was the moment that inspired Causa Prima. We had spent years building Taulia for the buyer side — optimizing payment timing, managing cash, running early-pay programs at scale. And we were good at it: $50B a year across 5 million suppliers. But sitting in that room, I realized we had been solving only half the problem.
We built the best tool in the world, but mostly for one side of the table. The other side — the supplier, the small business actually waiting to get paid — was still stuck chasing companies for payment. This was not an AP optimization problem. This was someone’s livelihood sitting in an approval queue.
The chase between companies costs the buyer time, but it costs the supplier everything. That is what I am building now. Causa Prima touches both sides of the transaction, on the same system — a network between companies, so the back-and-forth resolves itself.