Collectly raises $1.9 million to move debt collection online

A few months ago I wrote about a little startup called Collectly going after the big, inefficient debt collection industry by using modern tools to ease the process for debtors while also increasing the amount of money recovered. Based on some early traction, the company has raised $1.9 million in seed funding to grow its nascent business.

While most debt collection agencies still use paper mailings and phone calls in their attempts to recover their clients’ money, Collectly is moving its interactions online, tracking and collecting data from debtors in how they respond — or don’t respond — to its outreach.

By creating a more personalized outreach and collection strategy, the company attempts to provide people who owe money with appropriately structured repayment solutions that allow clients to recoup some of their losses, even if debtors can’t pay the whole amount owed.

According to CEO Levon Brutyan, who worked at a collections agency in Europe before founding the startup, that enables Collectly to recover two to three times as much debt as agencies using traditional methods.

Today Collectly’s focus has been on the healthcare industry, and the company is looking to sign up the 100,000 different medical practices around the country. To help with that effort, the team is working on integration with Athena Health and DrChrono, which are some of the largest electronic health record providers.

The hope is that those integrations will boost distribution by making it easier for doctors to take advantage of its service. Because Collectly will sync with existing health record systems, doctors and medical practices need to export spreadsheets or do a lot of manual work to get up and running.

As it looks to serve more customers, Collectly raised a little less than $2 million in funding to invest in the business. That seed financing was led by GoAhead Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, WTI, IT-Farm, Cabra.vc, Granatus Ventures, and OnWave Ventures.