Spanish startup Murphy has raised $15 million in offering AI-powered debt collection.
The company says the pre-seed/seed funding round announced on Monday (July 14th) will allow Murphy to expand its product, expand its team and expand its internationally.
“Due to maintenance has historically been slowly fragmented and highly analogue industry, relying on popular engagement methods that leave expensive call centers and massive amounts of recoverable debt untouched or amortized,” Murphy said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.
The company says it is rethinking the process with a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) voice agents, “omnichannel outreach,” and behavioral personalization.
The goal here is to provide a call centre alternative and help businesses collect debts faster. “While obedient and respecting the debtor,” Murphy co-founder and CEO Borja Sole said in the release.
According to the release, Murphy's technology is being adopted by banks, telecommunications, utilities and debt services companies around the world.
“Debt services are a global industry that weighs over $300 billion and is ripe for disruption. After reviewing countless industries, this has stood out as a space where AI can have a major impact.”
“Given their experience and unrelenting development speed, Borja and his team are positioned independently to change this space.”
This funding comes when, as PYMNTS recently wrote, many companies are holding a noble view on the potential of agent AI, while also showing that they are reluctant to use it.
“Despite increasing capabilities, Agent AI is deployed in experimental or limited pilot settings, with the majority of the system operating under human supervision,” the report states.
“But why are middle market companies reluctant to unleash the full power of autonomous AI? The answer is both strategic and psychological. The possibilities for technology are enormous, but the preparation of systems (and humans) is less clear.”
For AI to function autonomously, PYMNT added, so companies need to trust not only the output, but the entire decision-making process that produced it. Such trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose.
According to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey, 80% of high-automatic companies complained of security and privacy as the biggest concern to Agent AI, 62% were concerned about integration issues, and 57% were concerned about the accuracy of AI's generated output.
“These figures reflect general trends. Agent AI is treated as a high potential high risk technology that has not yet met the compliance, reliability and trust thresholds required for enterprise-scale deployments,” writes Pymnts.
