Veritus Brings AI Agents to the Consumer Lending Industry
Loan servicing and collections has historically been one of the most labor-intensive – and most regulated – corners of consumer finance. Lenders need to recover delinquent balances, treat borrowers respectfully, and stay within an ever-tightening compliance perimeter, all while keeping the cost-to-collect manageable. Veritus, a Y Combinator Summer 2025 company based in San Francisco, is rebuilding that workflow from the ground up with AI debt collection software that handles the entire servicing and collections lifecycle – including inbound and outbound voice calls.
The company’s promise is striking: voice agents that can negotiate repayment plans, follow up across channels, and drive recoveries with zero human involvement. By combining cutting-edge voice AI with deep regulatory compliance and vertical specialization, Veritus is targeting two outcomes that lenders typically have to trade off against each other: dramatically reduced operating costs and meaningfully higher recovery rates. In an industry where margins are thin and regulators are vigilant, that combination is a significant claim – and one the founding team is uniquely positioned to deliver on.
Veritus was founded in 2025 by a trio of repeat operators with deep enterprise SaaS, fintech, and AI backgrounds. Joshua March, the company’s founder and CEO, has multiple exits behind him, including the enterprise SaaS company Conversocial, which was acquired by Verint (NASDAQ: VRNT). He was also co-founder and CEO of a16z-backed SCiFi Foods, and is the author of Message Me, a book about the future of customer service in the era of AI and social media. Co-founder David Schlesinger brings more than 10 years of startup experience, including stints at Divvy Homes and Cloudflare. Co-founder Joseph Stein rounds out the team. Together they bring a rare combination of regulated-industry know-how, technical depth, and prior wins at scale.
The market opportunity is enormous. The U.S. consumer lending industry alone services trillions of dollars in outstanding balances, with collections accounting for a meaningful chunk of operating costs at every major lender. Most servicers and collectors still rely on large human call centers and rigid playbooks, which are expensive, hard to scale, and inconsistent in tone and outcome. AI voice agents that are fluent, compliant, and trained for the specific patterns of consumer lending have the potential to absorb a huge share of this work – and to do it more empathetically and consistently than the average overworked agent on a Tuesday afternoon.
What sets Veritus apart from horizontal voice AI plays is its insistence on vertical specialization. Consumer lending isn’t just another use case; it’s a domain layered with state and federal rules, disclosure requirements, and rapidly evolving consumer protections. By going deep on one sector, the company can build agents that are not just capable but defensible – products that compliance, legal, and risk teams can sign off on. That positioning is reflected in the team’s hiring; Veritus is currently hiring a Full Stack Engineer to help scale the platform.