A Seattle-area startup is bringing artificial intelligence to one of finance's most delicate challenges: asking people for money they owe.
KredosAI, founded in 2021 by former T-Mobile executives Balaji Sridharan and Dave Thoms, announced a $7 million Series A funding round led by BMW i Ventures — the independent venture capital arm of BMW Group. The round was oversubscribed, with participation from Motley Fool Ventures, Walter Ventures, and existing backers including Okapi Venture Capital and SaaS Ventures.
The company's platform uses AI and behavioral science to optimize how businesses communicate with customers who have fallen behind on payments. Rather than sending generic, escalating demand notices, KredosAI tailors the wording, timing, and channel of each message — whether text, email, RCS, or AI voice agent — based on the customer's account history and profile.
"The majority of consumers who go late on payment actually want to pay," Sridharan said. "There's a very small subset of people that are fraudsters, but most of them want to pay."
The premise is that most late payments stem from forgetfulness, short-term cash crunches, or even frustration with the service — not deliberate non-payment. By approaching the conversation more intelligently, KredosAI helps companies recover revenue while preserving customer relationships.
The results speak for themselves: across its customer base, the platform reports a 11.5% reduction in write-offs and a 13.6% increase in customer lifetime value compared with traditional collections methods. The company says it has handled more than 200 million customer interactions over the past two years, with revenue growing more than sixfold in that span.
The BMW i Ventures connection is strategic. Subprime auto-loan delinquencies have reached their highest levels since the 1990s, creating acute pain for automakers and lenders. Sridharan noted that lenders increasingly recognize the overlap between telecom and auto lending — both involve balancing recovery costs against customer retention value.
KredosAI is also a technology partner of FICO, integrating its platform into the FICO Platform used by banks and large enterprises for credit decisions and collections.
The company has about 25 employees, with roughly eight in the Seattle area. The new funding will fuel sales, marketing, product development around agentic AI and voice agents, and international expansion. Sridharan expects to roughly double headcount over the next year to 50 people or more.
"This gives us a bit of fuel to go to market a little more aggressively than we have in the past," he said.
