Germany

Personio Acquires Circula to Bring HR, Payroll and Spend Management Together

Oct 6, 2026 | By Oliver Bennett

SUMMARY

Personio has acquired Circula, a German spend management platform.
The deal brings HR, payroll, and spend management together on one platform.
The deal strengthens Personio’s move into employee spending and expense management.

HRTech unicorn Personio has acquired Circula, a German platform that helps businesses manage company spending.

With the acquisition, Personio aims to become the first European platform to bring HR, payroll, and spend management together in one solution.

“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.”

“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.”