Entrepreneurs Win $25k After Creating Online Marketplace for Debt Collection

A pair of entrepreneurs who built a platform that matches small businesses with collection agencies to help collect on unpaid accounts have won a $25,000 award from the University of Texas at Dallas.

It’s the second award for Cameron Desautels, Ed Luczycki, and Matthew Darner, the creators of Collbox, which uses machine learning to place accounts uploaded by small businesses with the collection agency most skilled at collecting that type of debt. The trio came up with the idea when Luczycki, who ran a consulting business, could not find an easy solution to help him go after clients that had not yet paid their bills.

Collbox also won a $50,000 prize from Quickbooks back in 2015, according to a published report.

Companies seeking to place debt via Collbox do so free of charge. The company makes its money by collecting a percentage of the unpaid debts recovered by the collection agency.

Using Collbox will help take the guesswork out of deciding which collection agency a small business should use when placing an account, the company says.

“Our agency partners report back to us on a regular basis on the status of each collection and we report that to our customer,” Darner said in the report. “Typically, our users don’t need to interact with the agency unless they have a specific issue or question.”