Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
JustSolve puts its €3.7M pre-seed into sales while the CTO pauses engineering hires
The Milan debt-collection startup says offers ran three to three-and-a-half times the €3.7 million it took, and the cash is going to sales and product because its CTO thinks AI coding tools cover the engineering.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- JustSolve, a Milan startup whose AI agents pursue unpaid debts, raised 3.7 million euros of pre-seed money led by Base10 Partners, of which 3 million is equity and the rest is grant funding.
- Founder Alberta Trombetta said the round drew offers three to three-and-a-half times the sum she accepted, with Entourage, 2100 Ventures, Vento Ventures and Ithaca joining alongside the founders as angels.
- Creditors upload their recovery policies and the agents work claims from first reminder to legal action by voice, WhatsApp, email, post and PEC, Italy's certified email system.
- The pivot followed a failed small-claims dispute-resolution platform backed by 100,000 euros from the Reef program, which almost exhausted the founders' capital.
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Why it matters
- decision With 3 million euros of equity, every engineer not hired is a sales hire instead, so the round is being spent on winning Italian creditors before the product has to satisfy a second country's consumer-protection regime.
- constraint Each new European jurisdiction's collection rules must be absorbed by a team the company has decided not to grow. That sets the pace at which JustSolve can follow its buy-now-pay-later customers abroad.
- exposure InDebted's more than $130 million of raised capital against a valuation above $250 million shows what a funded incumbent could spend to contest Italy if it decides to enter.
- cost By taking 3.7 million euros instead of the double-digit millions offered, JustSolve leaves the compliance engineering build, whenever it comes, to be funded at the next round's price.
The offers Trombetta describes put demand between €11.1 million and €12.95 million, so JustSolve declined somewhere between €7.4 million and €9.25 million of it [1][2]. "Raising the funds was easy... we received offers three to three-and-a-half times higher than the amount we ultimately decided to accept," she said [4]. Of what she accepted, €3 million is equity and €700,000 is grant money [3][3].
Most of the money goes to sales and product roles [7]. Manicardi, the co-founder Trombetta met at Vento's Reef program, believes AI coding tools can meet the company's current needs, so engineering headcount stays where it is [6][8].
Coding tools may have made engineering the cheap half of a pre-seed, and €3 million of equity now buys more selling than it would have bought two years ago. Or €3 million does not fund a sales team and an engineering team at once when the customers are buy-now-pay-later firms, e-commerce sellers and utilities such as Scalapay, and the tools are the reason given for a decision the budget had already made [15]. I lean to the second. If JustSolve opens a second European jurisdiction with the same engineering headcount, Manicardi's judgement holds and mine does not.
"It is rare to come across founders who have a deep understanding of a workflow and are willing to rebuild it from the ground up using AI, and that is precisely what this team is doing," said Adeyemi Ajao, co-founder and managing partner at Base10 Partners [16]. Tech Funding News wrote that whether an AI agent can handle collection across different consumer-protection rules without a much bigger engineering team will decide which of Trombetta's two goals, €100 million of revenue or a unicorn valuation, arrives first [22][21].
The platform has handled more than 2 million claims and runs about 1,000 debtor interactions a day, and 2 million interactions at that rate would take about 2,000 days, or five and a half years [13][14][4]. Claims and interactions are different units, and the period over which the claims accumulated is not disclosed.
InDebted, the Australian competitor, has raised more than $130 million and was valued above $250 million after its 2024 Series C, so cumulative capital is roughly half the last price [17][5]. India's Rezolv raised $12.5 million in a 2026 Series A [18]. Neither operates in Italy, and either could expand there [19].
Kaplan Group put the global AI debt-collection market at about $2.8 billion in 2025 and $11.4 billion in 2035, a compound rate near 15% a year [20][6]. Trombetta calls it a "golden moment" for the industry and says most competition so far has come from the United States and Australia, with Europe only beginning [23]. The €100 million of revenue she wants starts from about 1,000 conversations a day [21][14].
What to watch
- Whether JustSolve's next hiring wave is engineering, and how large, once it sells outside Italy.
- Whether InDebted or Rezolv opens an Italian operation.
- Whether the company dates the 2 million claims figure or reports revenue against the 100 million euro target.