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Investors alway preach ‘persistence’ to founders but it’s a quality that is required of VCs as well and one which earned us a supporting spot in TrueAccord’s seed round. Homebrew was introduced to CEO Ohad Samet late in their financing process. In fact, it was already pretty much complete given Ohad’s previous relationships with Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin and others. But we quickly became fast friends and were excited to play a small role in backing Ohad and team.
Who: Ohad is an impressive guy when it comes to financial technology, having previously held founding and leadership roles at a host of companies such Fraud Sciences (acquired by PayPal), Signifyd and Klarna. It’s this experience, along with his team, that gave us confidence in the audacious vision he had to transform the historically insidious world of consumer debt collection.
What: As Wired magazine proclaimed, “This Startup’s on a Mission to Save Us From Seedy Debt Collectors.” The TrueAccord team believes there’s an opportunity to help both consumers and merchants by creating a more friendly, efficient debt collection system, one which uses data and personalization to collect owed monies rather than abrasive dinner time phone calls. TrueAccord provides debt collection as a service so, for example, a large online marketplace can contract with TrueAccord to collect on its behalf in exchange for TrueAccord keeping a small percentage of what it recovers.
How: Data science! Machine learning! Behavioral economics! Basically, TrueAccord utilizes a combination of data intelligence and behavioral psychology to provide debt collection as a service to merchants, banks and any holder of consumer debt. They use a variety of information to solve two problems. First, what’s the right offer and message to deliver to a consumer to help them pay their debt. Second, which of these consumers should the merchant continue to service. Too often one episode of indebtedness can cause a business to completely write off a customer. If you think this sounds interesting, they’re hiring.
Why: At Homebrew we believe the entire financial services industry is especially fertile ground for improvement via software. In the case of TrueAccord, the debt collection industry is one in which both sides of the transaction - the consumer and the merchant - can benefit. The only people who suffer from TrueAccord’s success are the increasingly outdated debt collectors who buy their inventory for pennies on the dollar and then employ a wealth of old-fashioned (and sometimes illegal) tactics for collection.
Congratulations to Ohad and team for the momentum to date. We’re excited to support this mission!