When a Lufthansa passenger lands six hours late in Frankfurt, the EU says she is owed up to €600. Getting that money out of an airline can take a year. RightNow, a Düsseldorf legaltech founded in 2017, will wire her a discounted lump sum within a day, then chase the carrier itself.
That is the entire pitch. The company calls itself a consumer factoring provider, the legal-claims equivalent of an invoice factor. It buys the receivable, takes the litigation risk, and pays out fast [Crunchbase]. For a flyer who would rather have €280 today than €600 in fourteen months after a court fight, the trade is intuitive. For RightNow, the bet is that it can price those claims accurately at scale and run the recovery machine cheaper than its customers ever could.
The bet
The wedge is speed. Co-founder and managing director Dr. Benedikt M. Quarch has built RightNow around a promise to pay out a large proportion of a claim's value within 24 hours of purchase [Crunchbase]. That puts it in a different posture from peers like Flightright, AirHelp, and ClaimCompass, which generally operate on a contingency model: the consumer waits for the airline to pay, and the agent takes a cut at the end [CB Insights]. RightNow takes the cash-flow hit upfront and keeps the upside if it collects in full.
The model only works if two things are true. First, the underlying claims have to be legally clean and reasonably predictable in payout, which describes EU Regulation 261/2004 flight-delay claims almost perfectly: statutory amounts, established case law, and a small set of repeat defendants. Second, the company has to fund the float. That is where the equity raise comes in.
Why it could be big
In December 2020, RightNow closed a Series A of €8.5M, led with participation from VR Ventures and the asset management arm of Schwarzwälder Boten [AIN, December 2020][EquityPitcher Ventures, December 2020]. Cumulative disclosed funding has since climbed past €25M [Startbase]. The company has described itself as Europe's largest consumer factoring company [Legal Tech Blog].
Series A (Dec 2020) | 8.5 | EUR M
Total disclosed funding | 25 | EUR M
The addressable surface is wider than flights. Any standardized consumer claim with a slow payer at the other end is a candidate: rail compensation, gym memberships frozen during lockdowns, terminated mobile contracts, energy overcharges. Each vertical is small on its own. Stacked, they form something that looks less like a law firm and more like a specialty finance book, with software doing the underwriting. That is the version of RightNow that justifies venture pricing.
VR Ventures, the venture arm tied to the German cooperative banking group, is a telling backer here [EquityPitcher Ventures, December 2020]. Cooperative-bank money tends to be patient and comfortable with balance-sheet-style risk, which is exactly what a factoring book demands. A traditional growth fund chasing a SaaS multiple would be a worse fit.
The team and traction
Quarch, who holds a doctorate in law, co-founded the company in 2017 and remains co-founder and managing director [The Org][Crunchbase]. Phillip Eischet is the other co-founder on record [Legal Tech Blog]. Headcount sits in the 11 to 50 band according to Startbase, with one secondary source citing more than 40 employees [Startbase]. The company is registered as RightNow GmbH in North Rhine-Westphalia [Startbase].
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 | Startbase |
| Headquarters | Düsseldorf | Startbase |
| Series A | €8.5M (Dec 2020) | AIN |
| Total disclosed funding | ~€25M | Startbase |
| Headcount | 11 to 50 | Startbase |
| Position claim | Europe's largest consumer factoring co. | Legal Tech Blog |
Traction beyond those numbers is harder to triangulate from public filings, but the customer-review footprint on Trustpilot is active, suggesting consistent claim volume rather than a dormant brand [Trustpilot].
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is that contingency-model competitors have already trained European consumers to expect zero upfront cost. Flightright and AirHelp are larger, better-known, and do not have to fund a balance sheet to operate [CB Insights]. If a flyer is willing to wait, the contingency player keeps more of her money. RightNow is selling liquidity, and liquidity is a commodity priced by interest rates. In a higher-rate environment, the discount RightNow has to apply to a claim widens, which makes its offer less attractive against a free-to-file rival.
The bull answer, drawn from the model itself, is that a meaningful slice of consumers value cash today over a maximum payout later, particularly for smaller claims where the contingency cut and the wait both feel disproportionate. Factoring has coexisted with collections in B2B for a century for the same reason. RightNow is betting consumer behavior rhymes. The €25M raised so far is, in part, the cost of proving that.
What to watch
Three things over the next twelve months. First, any disclosure of new claim verticals beyond flights and the existing consumer categories: rail compensation under EU rules and energy contract disputes are the obvious adjacencies. Second, a follow-on round. The 2020 Series A is now several years old, and a factoring book that is genuinely scaling will need either fresh equity, a debt facility, or a securitization vehicle to keep funding payouts. The shape of that next financing will say more about unit economics than any press release. Third, any sign of regulatory scrutiny on claim-purchasing models, which European consumer protection agencies have circled before.