Why we invested in SmallClaims

Every finance team has a folder of invoices it has quietly given up on. The amounts are too small to justify a lawyer, a court case can drag on for over a year, and once you add up the hours, writing the money off looks like the sensible choice. Across the EU, that choice adds up to more than €930 billion in claims every year. SmallClaims founder Christian Olson, an attorney and former General Counsel of Too Good To Go, puts it simply: the court system “was built for an era in which a lawyer sat with every single case.” That works fine for a €1 million dispute, “but not for a €2,000 invoice.”

SmallClaims is changing that math. The Copenhagen company has built a platform where a chain of specialised AI agents runs a case from legal assessment and settlement through filing, judgment and enforcement. A case that used to take more than 15 hours of legal work now takes about 1.5. SmallClaims wins more than nine out of ten cases. Its 500+ customers include debt collection agencies, law firms and businesses sitting on piles of unpaid invoices.

Now, the company has raised €2M in a seed round led by us, and we couldn’t be more excited to back the team as they take SmallClaims across Europe.

The deal came to us through Oliver Rye, a longtime angel friend of ours in Denmark. Jupe Arala, Partner at Vendep, had gone through Oliver’s angel portfolio many times before something finally caught his attention. SmallClaims is exactly the kind of company Jupe likes: an archaic, borderline boring problem that takes grit and hard work to solve, in a market that doesn’t open easily to newcomers.

What built conviction

You can’t vibe code your way into litigation. Doing what SmallClaims does takes processes, legal domain knowledge and serious infrastructure that connects to courts and everything around them. That’s a very different job from building a piece of software, plugging AI into it and calling it a product. With small claims, you have to build the whole pipeline before you can run cases through it.

SmallClaims had already done much of that work. When we met, the company had a product, customers and thousands of processed claims behind it. The team saw the problem up close first and only then started building a new way to solve it.

“From our first conversations with Christian, it was clear he understands this problem both as a litigator and as someone who has led legal inside a scaling company.”

That comes from who the team is. “From our first conversations with Christian, it was clear he understands this problem both as a litigator and as someone who has led legal inside a scaling company,” Jupe says. Pair that with a platform built around AI from day one, and you get a combination that is rare. The team was also open about how hard the problem is and realistic about what it takes to solve it. That mix of domain knowledge, grit and willingness to learn is what we look for in founders.

Customers backed this up. Clients who trusted SmallClaims with their claims are getting results and say they’ll keep using them. Even traditional claim handling firms send SmallClaims their toughest cases, the ones they haven’t been able to recover themselves. That told us the team is ready to take on the hardest problems in the space.

Why now

Plenty of companies recover unpaid claims, but most still do it the old way. SmallClaims could easily have become one more of them. Instead, it set out to run the entire process with agents, which only became realistic in the last six to twelve months. A claim handler working the traditional way can manage maybe 30 to 60 claims a month. A claim handler overseeing agents can handle thousands. The whole business case rests on that difference.

Over the next 12 to 24 months, SmallClaims will finish building the agentic pipeline. Today the agents assess claims and prepare the court case. Filing, follow-up, mediation and payment come next. The company already operates in Denmark and Sweden. Next it will pick a couple of much larger markets and compete with the strongest local players there. Christian’s goal for this round is to prove the platform works “country after country, not just in Denmark.” All of this has to add up to a go-to-market engine that can multiply the number of clients and claims by 10 or even 100.

The road from seed to Series A is our home turf. We’ll help the team scope its go-to-market and track the metrics that prove the business case, take part in key sales and marketing hires, and work closely with them through the A round. The SmallClaims team are domain experts rather than typical tech founders, so connecting them with experienced founders in our community is a big part of how we can help.

Welcome to the Vendep community, SmallClaims! 💚