ElevenLabs and Northzone fund Murphy’s $15M AI debt collector
Category: AI / Fintech Tags: AI, Fintech, Poland
Polish-founded ElevenLabs joins $15M raise for Murphy, the AI debt collection startup automating Europe’s trickiest conversations
In a fresh sign of Central and Eastern Europe’s rising influence in frontier AI, Murphy, a Barcelona-based startup building autonomous AI agents for debt collection, has secured a $15 million funding round — with a notable Polish connection at its core.
The round was led by Northzone, with significant participation from ElevenLabs, the Warsaw-founded AI audio unicorn now headquartered in New York. Other backers included Lakestar, Seedcamp, and Enzo Ventures. The raise consists of $13M in seed funding and $2M in pre-seed, making it one of Europe’s most-watched early-stage AI investments in the debt and credit space.
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Murphy’s core proposition is both controversial and timely: replacing legacy call centers and debt collection agencies with multilingual AI agents capable of contacting debtors via SMS, WhatsApp, email, and even voice calls. These agents are powered by OpenAI’s LLMs and trained on real-world workflows used by banks, telcos, and utility companies.
Why ElevenLabs Is Betting on AI Agents
While Murphy may be based in Spain, its funding reflects the broader pan-European nature of AI innovation, with ElevenLabs — founded by Polish entrepreneur Piotr Dąbkowski — playing a strategic role in the round.
ElevenLabs’ participation aligns with its mission to enable high-quality, emotionally resonant AI voice experiences, a critical component for Murphy, whose AI agents must handle sensitive financial conversations while respecting regulatory boundaries.
“Debt collection isn’t just about logic — it’s about tone, empathy, and timing,” one insider from ElevenLabs told us. “Murphy’s vision of human-sounding AI agents aligns perfectly with our advances in multilingual AI speech synthesis.”
The Automation of Empathy
Murphy CEO Borja Sole describes debt collection as a space “ripe for automation” but fraught with ethical, legal, and emotional complexity. Traditional agencies employ over 114,000 people across Europe, according to IBISWorld data. Yet, the process is often fragmented, inefficient, and deeply unpleasant for both agents and customers.
Sole says Murphy’s agents are trained with guardrails designed in collaboration with banking clients to protect vulnerable individuals. “We’re not just replacing humans — we’re reengineering the whole process to be more humane, not less,” he said.
Murphy charges its clients — including banks, telcos, and DCAs — a performance-based fee tied to successful recovery outcomes. Unlike traditional call centers that rely on manual escalation, Murphy’s software can scale globally in minutes, adapting tone, language, and policy logic across jurisdictions.
Poland’s Growing Role in European AI
Murphy’s raise underscores a growing trend: Polish-born tech founders and VCs increasingly shaping Europe’s AI infrastructure. ElevenLabs, now a global leader in AI speech synthesis, was founded in 2022 in Warsaw, and still sources talent and research from Poland’s elite technical universities.
Furthermore, the Polish market — where debt collection is a €1.5 billion annual business — is seen as a prime target for Murphy’s expansion. Several major Polish DCAs and credit management firms are already exploring pilot integrations. As BGK (Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego) and the Polish government pursue digitization strategies under the PLN 2.8 billion KPO initiative, automated debt collection — especially with responsible AI — could become a critical use case for digital transformation in financial services.
Beyond the Call Center
The bigger story, however, is that Murphy joins a new wave of AI agent companies — startups building task-specific autonomous systems to replace entire categories of white-collar work. According to Sifted, over €1.9 billion has been invested into AI agents in 2025 alone. With Polish-backed ElevenLabs at its side, Murphy aims to become the default infrastructure for automated debt recovery — starting in Europe, but with global ambition.
As debt markets become more complex and globalized, the ability to deploy compliant, culturally-aware AI agents at scale could redefine how financial institutions manage their most uncomfortable customer interactions. And Poland, once a nearshore destination for outsourced call centers, may now help lead the charge in automating them altogether.
