Personio acquires spend management platform Circula to bring payroll, expenses and benefits under one roof

Personio has acquired Circula, the Berlin spend management platform used by more than 3,000 European mid-market businesses for expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable and tax-optimised benefits. Terms were not disclosed. Circula operates as Circula by Personio from today, with its team joining.

Personio, the Munich HR software unicorn led by co-founder and CEO Hanno Renner, serves about 16,000 European customers and has built its own payroll engine. The two companies had integrated for several years and already share many customers; the deal makes the integration permanent and, in Renner's words, puts everything a company spends on its people, payroll, expenses and benefits, in one system for the first time in Europe.

Circula co-founder and CEO Nikolai Skatchkov said the unsolved problem was that expense-side and payroll-side tax logic had always been built by two different companies. Both firms keep their DATEV integrations and tax-advisor communities, which will converge into one solution over time.

The read: HR software buying the corporate card, the same pattern Rippling and Deel followed in the US.