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For Mohammad Al-Khalili, there's no bigger and more personal problem worth solving than debt collection, one of finance's most avoided corners, which his company ClearGrid came out of stealth with $10M to tackle in 2025.
ClearGrid is, at its core, an outcome-as-a-service business. It would rather get paid when the lender gets paid than charge by the seat, and whether the work is done by AI or humans is, in his words, its problem and not the client's.
The premise is a blunt one, debt is broken, the market is enormous, climbing towards the trillions, and almost no one wants to touch it.
Together with co-founders Mohammad Al Zaben and Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, they've won over a long list of backers.
The pre-Seed co-led by RAED Ventures and BECO Capital, and the Seed co-led by Nuwa Capital and RAED Ventures, with further institutional investors including aramco's Wa'ed Ventures, KBW Ventures, Sharaka Capital, 9Yards Capital, Protagonist, BYLD, Eirad Holdings, Endeavor Catalyst and Wamda Capital.
The round also drew angels including Replit's Amjad Masad, Twitch's Justin Kan and Marqeta's Jason Gardner.
This was, by far and away, one of my favourite conversations that I've had on the FWDstart podcast to date, so a massive thanks again to Khalili for taking the time to shoot the breeze with me on a Saturday morning.
We cover:
Beginning deliberately, as an old-fashioned debt-collection agency, as a way to learn the market from the inside before building anything
Refusing to be cast as a voice-AI company, with the layer becoming quickly commoditised, and where real defensibility lies instead
Why the cold call is quietly dying, with pickup rates heading for single digits, and why the future belongs to personal AI assistants rather than any one channel
The rationale behind having an anthropologist in residence, and how debt collection is actually as much a problem of culture and design as it is tech
How AI has reshaped both how and who they hire as designers, and the ambition to climb from the 70% of code now written by AI towards upwards of 95%
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - What ClearGrid Is, and Why Debt Is Broken
03:00 - Solving for Both the Lender and the Borrower
04:00 - From Agency, to Tools, to Outcome as a Service
06:00 - The "No Humans" Thesis, and Buying the Debt
08:00 - The First Voice AI Was a Nightmare
10:00 - Why "We Get Paid When You Get Paid"
11:00 - A Short History of Debt, and Why Collection Is Changing
15:00 - Who the Customers Are
17:00 - Why AI Is the Fairer, More Dignified Collector
19:00 - No Ego: Anger, Shame & the Hard Cases
21:00 - Command: A CRM Built for AI, Not Humans
25:00 - Why He Refuses to Build a Voice-AI Company
27:00 - AI Disclosure, and Why It Changes the Game
30:00 - Code-Switching, Arabic & Building Multilingual
33:00 - The Pivot From Empathy to Dignity
40:00 - The Anthropologist in Residence
41:00 - Is There an Existential Threat to ClearGrid?
43:00 - What Keeps Him Up at Night, and the Wrapper Trap
45:00 - "No Bigger Problem Worth Solving in My Life"
49:00 - How AI Is Changing Who Gets to Build
52:00 - 70% of the Code Is Written by AI
53:00 - What's Next: Buying the Debt & Going Global
59:00 - First Principles: Taking Debt Off the Books
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