Building a Trust Score for the Real World: Inside IOU’s Founders and the Problem They’re Solving

Why the OTH co-founders are addressing one of the most persistent pain points for small businesses and independent professionals: late payments.

For most small businesses, freelancers, and contractors, the worst part of a job isn’t the work. It’s the awkward, relentless follow-up to get paid. You delivered. The client’s happy. And yet the invoice drifts into a gray zone of “soon,” “processing,” or radio silence. Do you push harder and risk the relationship? Do you hand it to collections and torch it altogether? Or do you swallow the loss and move on?

The founders behind IOU believe there’s a better way, one that treats trust as a first-class asset.

Who’s Behind IOU

Maximiliaan van Kuyk and his co-founder Sauveur Atlan aren’t theorizing from the sidelines. They’ve lived the accounts-receivable grind across startups and advisory roles—and, at scale, they’ve built products and communities that understand how reputation moves money and opportunity.

Before IOU, members of the team founded and built the creator-commerce platform OTH Network, which connected brands and influential creators in a way that re-wired dealmaking for hospitality and dining—showcasing a deep grasp of social trends and network effects in the real economy. That work—and its impact on an evolving restaurant scene—has been profiled by Forbes, underscoring the team’s fluency in pairing technology with human behavior to drive business outcomes. Forbes

IOU’s leadership stack reflects that bias toward real-world execution: a technical founder who’s shipped consumer-scale products, a strategy/marketing lead who’s orchestrated large-format growth campaigns and brand partnerships, and a CTO with hands-on depth in secure, operational code. Surrounding them is a cross-functional advisory bench, from ex meta and apple product and AI advisory to ex wework branding and business development, experienced in launching products that must work in the messy, offline-meets-online world where contracts, payments, and reputations collide. IOU also has early backing from some notable angels and Infinity Constellation VC, whose founder & chairman founded Invisible Technologies, a Scale AI competitor in AI training. 

The pain point: money owed, patience thin

Ask any owner-operator or solo professional what keeps them up at night, and late payments land near the top. IOU’s founders speak plainly about it: in past companies, they eventually stood up entire departments just to do polite persistence: email, call, nudge, repeat. It’s expensive. It’s demoralizing. And for many sub-$100K matters, legal action simply isn’t rational.

On the other side of the table, buyers are wary of prepaying, especially with new vendors. They want proof of reliability, not just a polished proposal. The status quo forces both sides into a trust gap: Is this person as professional as they seem? Will they deliver? Will they pay on time?

The “why” of IOU: design a system where trust compounds

IOU’s north star is to create a financial trust ecosystem that rewards good behavior and reduces the need for confrontation. The team talks about three levers:

• Social accountability by design. In the same way ratings and reviews reshaped ride-sharing and short-term rentals, IOU believes a credible, portable work-and-payments score can nudge people to honor their commitments without escalating to court or public shaming.
• Follow-up that never gets tired. The founders watched how consistent, respectful persistence moves money and see automation (including AI-assisted context and cadence) as a humane, scalable way to maintain momentum without burning relationships.
• A record you can actually use. Over time, a history of completed agreements and on-time payments should make it faster to start new engagements, renegotiate terms, or even unlock new forms of lending for people with thin or unconventional credit files.

The ambition is not to reinvent contracts, signatures, or payment rails in isolation, but to weave them together with a living reputation layer that reflects how you operate in the real world.

“I’ve rarely met anyone who hasn’t been owed money and didn’t want to be the one chasing it,” Max says. “We want a system where the default is to do what you promised because your future business depends on it.”

Why now: the trust economy is no longer optional

Three macro shifts make IOU’s timing compelling:

1. AI-powered operations are moving from back office to front-of-house. Businesses expect workflows that proactively move tasks forward. Applied to payments, intelligent follow-ups and context-aware reminders are the difference between “forgotten” and “done.”
2. Work is more fluid than ever. From local contractors and on-site gig crews to remote creative talent, teams now assemble and disperse project by project. Traditional credit files and static references lag behind this reality. A dynamic, interaction-driven score meets workers where they are.
3. Peer-generated reputation beats top-down scores for everyday commerce. Governments experiment with top-down scoring; banks rely on FICO-style models built for institutional lending. IOU’s founders want a bottom-up, interaction-proofed score—created by the people who actually worked with you.
4. Malicious bots are everywhere. The internet is no longer mostly human. In 2025, over one-third of online traffic comes from bot-driven activity—ranging from fake accounts and data scraping to fraud and identity theft. Add deepfakes and AI-generated profiles into the mix, and suddenly, a polished email or smiling profile picture doesn’t mean much. In this environment, the only thing that matters is a verified record of who actually delivered work and who actually paid.

Who benefits first

While the vision is broad—individuals and small businesses, not just enterprises—the earliest traction the founders foresee is in localized contractor work and live entertainment/hospitality: agencies, production crews, event vendors, photographers, DJs, and venue partners. These are fast-moving ecosystems where reputations travel by text message and where a handful of late payments can distort an entire month’s cash flow.

 

A Short Conversation with IOU’s Founder, Maximiliaan van Kuyk

For someone who’s never heard of IOU, what’s the big idea?

Maximiliaan van Kuyk: Think of the connective tissue between a signed agreement, the money flow tied to it, and a credible history of how both parties behaved. We’re not trying to publish product specs before launch, but from the top down, imagine if the counter-signature, the payment, and the social accountability all lived together, so good behavior compounds.

What’s the single pain point that made you build this?

van Kuyk: Accounts receivable. In a previous company we literally built a department to follow up—with respect and persistence—on money we were owed. For smaller businesses, you usually don’t have the leverage or the appetite to go legal on a $10K or $30K matter. And you don’t want to torch a relationship. We asked, “What if follow-up could be tireless, contextual, and neutral…and what if everyone knew that their future work depended on their track record?”

Who do you see benefiting most early on?

van Kuyk: Local contractors and the entertainment/hospitality ecosystem. Agencies, performers, crews, event vendors—lots of independent professionals who do amazing work and just want to be paid promptly. Over time, remote workers benefits too. In a world where AI can generate plausible profiles, being able to say, “Here are the people I’ve worked with, and here’s what they say,” matters.

Why should business owners and freelancers trust IOU?

van Kuyk: Because it gives them utility on day one—cleaner agreements, professional follow-through—and a reputation they can build on. There’s social accountability baked in. You’re not yelling into the void; the system itself encourages everyone to do what they promised.

 

The founders’ edge: social fluency + product pragmatism

Plenty of tools promise to “streamline” contracting or payments. What IOU’s backers are buying into is the founders’ pattern recognition. They’ve watched up close how social proof moves dollars in hospitality, dining, creators, and branded events. They’ve also wrestled with the unglamorous glue work of follow-ups, reconciliations, and extensions. That rare mix of cultural fluency and operations discipline is why investors are listening.

“If two teams pitched the same idea,” one industry observer notes, “you’d back the ones who already turned social dynamics into business mechanics.”

A score that opens doors

Zoom out, and the promise of a portable reputation becomes larger than getting a single invoice paid.

• Fewer frictions to start. If your IOU history shows a hundred completed engagements and a near-perfect on-time record, you negotiate from strength; shorter payment terms, better rates, faster approvals.
• Healthier ecosystems. When everyone can see how everyone behaves, the worst actors either adapt or lose access. Communities get more resilient because trust is priced in.

What to watch next

IOU’s launch will clarify feature mechanics. But the metrics that matter won’t be vanity sign-ups. Watch for completed agreements, on-time payment rates, and how quickly new users find trusted counterparties. IOU will be an infrastructure for trust.

Until then, the bet is simple: in a world overflowing with tools, the teams who understand people win. IOU’s founders are building accordingly.

Learn more about IOU’s vision for building trust in the modern economy here.