Personio buys Circula to put expenses next to HR and payroll

Personio buys Circula to put expenses next to HR and payroll

10 October 2026: Personio, the Munich HR and payroll software company, has bought Circula, the Berlin expense management platform used by more than 3,000 companies and 250,000 people. Circula's website now opens with "Circula is now part of Personio", and the combined plan is to run salaries, benefits, expenses and company cards on one platform. Neither side has given a price.

Not yet independently verified. Neither company has published a dated press release that we could read; the deal is confirmed by Circula's own site, and the timing by a German trade weekly. Personio's press pages refused our requests, and no price, closing date or integration timetable has been stated. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Why an HR vendor wants the expense claims

The argument on Circula's new page is about tax. The tax treatment of travel expenses, allowances and benefits touches both the expense claim and the payslip, and until now the logic on each side was built by a different company. Bringing them together is meant to cut manual work for HR teams and give finance teams cleaner books and a faster month-end close.

Hanno Renner, Personio's co-founder and chief executive, puts it in customer terms: "Expense management is one of the capabilities our customers ask us for most, and it's complex to get right in Europe." Nikolai Skatchkov, Circula's co-founder and chief executive, describes the change as one of design: "What changes is that HR, spend, and now payroll are designed to be one."

The two already shared customers. Circula says its existing integration between its spend product and the HR platform is used by hundreds of joint customers, and it also connects to DATEV and other payroll tools and to SAP.

What stays the same for Circula customers

Circula says DATEV stays, its existing integration stays and its team's expertise stays. The page does not say whether Circula will remain a separate product and brand, whether its prices or contracts will change, or when the combined platform will be available. A customer using Circula alongside a different HR system has no statement yet on how long that setup will be supported, and that is the question to put to an account manager before the next renewal.

Two companies of different size

Personio was founded in Munich in 2015 and says it is used by more than 16,000 companies employing 1.6 million people, with six European offices and more than 1,500 staff. It sells to organisations with between 25 and 5,000 employees. Circula's page refers to more than nine years of work on European expense rules and lists its headquarters in Berlin. The deal appeared in the weekly round-up of the German startup outlet deutsche-startups.de on 10 October, alongside the week's other German acquisitions.

With payroll already in its product and expenses and cards now added, Personio covers most of what a mid-sized company pays its people through one vendor, where many such companies still connect separate HR, payroll and expense tools themselves.

Where this sits in our catalogue

We list Circula, and our payroll software category holds 13 products, our human resource software category 14 and our expense report category 4. Personio itself is not yet listed with us.

Company profile on TrustList: Circula

Sources

• Circula: Circula by Personio (read 2026-10-11), 11 October 2026
• deutsche-startups.de: Wochenrückblick 41/2026, 10 October 2026