What’s in a nudge? That is the question we asked ourselves after meeting Balaji Sridharan at a founder conference in Seattle last Fall. It turns out, a simple communication can be the difference between a customer paying their bills early, late or maybe never. Nudging as a lever is something well known to behavioral economists, but testing which messages work best used to be a painfully difficult task.

Until now!

Balaji’s team at KredosAI understood this problem given their work experiences in telecom and financial services and they developed a remarkable AI tool that takes the guesswork out of the equation. Enterprises can have anywhere between 15-20% of their customer base past due at any point in time. At risk are millions of dollars of impact to the bottom lines of mobile carriers and financial services firms who strain to keep customers from falling into the black hole of collections. Also in the balance are customer relationships that once broken, can be impossible to repair.

Today, we are pleased to announce our investment in KredosAI, the leading human-centric AI SaaS platform that provides a superior experience for delinquent consumers while helping enterprises improve their bottom line. StartFast is excited to lead the investment in KredosAI with participation from SaaS Ventures, Stout Street Capital, Okapi Ventures, Early Light Ventures and Seachange Fund. KredosAI’s proprietary AI model learns from actual customer payment behavior, enabling the platform to experiment with large numbers of approaches that scale effectively. KredosAI customers are seeing a 20X return on investment, an 8-10% reduction in suspend rates, and longer customer lifetime value versus companies using legacy systems or outdated approaches.

As cofounders, Balaji and David Thoms have decades of experience in credit risk management, corporate strategy and enterprise software. They are on a mission to change how enterprises resolve late payment issues for the benefit of all parties. StartFast is excited to join the journey and help the KredosAI team accelerate product development, hire new talent, and expand globally.