How JustSolve’s founder pivoted from a failed idea to raise €3.7M for AI debt collectors

JustSolve has raised €3.7 million in pre-seed funding to push its AI debt-collection software further across Europe. Base10 Partners led the round, with Entourage, 2100 Ventures, Vento Ventures and Ithaca joining in, alongside the company’s Italian founders as angel investors. Of the total, €3 million is equity and the rest is grant money.

The demand was strong enough that the startup says it received offers three to three-and-a-half times above what it chose to take. That is a tidy outcome for a company that nearly ran out of money before it found the right problem. Alberta Trombetta, who had spent seven years in litigation and commercial law before joining Vento’s Reef venture-building program, says the original idea was a dispute-resolution platform for small claims. It had €100,000 from Reef, and it failed.

The pivot came from the market, not from a whiteboard. Companies liked the problem, Trombetta says, even if they did not care much about the first product. JustSolve now asks creditors to upload their recovery policies, then uses AI agents to handle the work through voice, WhatsApp, email, regular mail and PEC, Italy’s certified email system. The system can deal with the process from early reminders to legal action without human involvement.

The startup says it has already handled more than 2 million claims, with about 1,000 debtor interactions a day. Its current customers include buy-now-pay-later firms, e-commerce businesses and utilities such as Scalapay. Trombetta wants the next wave of growth to come from financial institutions, utilities and banks across Europe, and says most of the new money will go into sales and product roles. Meanwhile, the CTO has paused engineer hiring because AI coding tools are doing enough for now.

Base10’s Adeyemi Ajao calls the team unusual for its deep grasp of a workflow it is rebuilding with AI. The bigger question is whether that model can survive Europe’s patchwork of consumer-protection rules without a much larger engineering effort. JustSolve says it wants to reach €100 million in revenue and become a unicorn. Those are different mountains, and one of them is a lot steeper than the pitch deck makes it look.