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"Pleo is well-positioned to become the dominant player in small business spend management, an $80 billion plus opportunity in Europe alone, and will only grow more essential to businesses as the company expands into bill payments in the near future," said Merritt Hummer, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

Pleo currently has more than 17,000 customers across six countries: Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Sweden.

In the end, the participants were persuaded to “sacrifice” one whimpering Pleo, sparing the others from their fate.

While the rational part of our mind knows that a Pleo is nothing but circuits, gears, and software—a machine that can be switched off, like a coffeemaker—our sympathetic impulses are fooled, and, because they’re fooled, to beat the robot is to train them toward misconduct.

Soldiers empathize with military robots; owners of Sony Aibo robot dogs mourn their mortality; and people refuse to “hurt” their Pleo robotic dinosaurs.