Fintech startup Ralio has just raised $2.5 million of pre-seed funding to make AI agentic payments safer.
The London-based company, founded in 2025, has developed a payments infrastructure layer to bring guardrails, identity verification, and audit trails into financial transactions that use agentic AI. The idea is to make bank transfers, card payments, and stablecoin exchanges safer.
The fresh funds come from Sure Valley Ventures, known as SVV, which led the round. Seed X, Love Ventures, Plug and Play, Antler, and fintech founders also participated.
AI agents are evolving from productivity tools to “autonomous economic actors capable of procuring services and managing capital,” according to Ghali Bennani Laafiret, cofounder and CEO of Ralio. However, finance is “still built for human intervention,” which introduces regulatory and financial risk.
“When a business uses an AI agent to move money for paying a supplier, processing payroll or managing its treasury, that agent needs permission, rules, and a way to prove it’s legitimate,” Bennani Laafiret tells Tech Funding News.
“Ralio sits between the AI agent and the payment, acting like a trust layer: it checks the agent’s identity, makes sure the payment is within the rules the business has set, and keeps a full record of everything. Think of it like a smart gatekeeper that lets the right payments through and blocks the wrong ones.”
Global payment giants double down on AI agents
Global payments giants like Mastercard and Visa are leaning hard into agentic AI, building their own technology for a world where AI agents do shopping, booking, and purchasing for consumers and businesses. On Monday, Visa released its own agentic AI payments platform.
These incumbents aren’t Ralio’s competition, Bennani Laafiret says. Rather, their push into AI actually strengthens the startup’s business case.
“We’re the infrastructure layer that sits between the business and those payment rails. Before a transaction ever reaches Visa or Mastercard, a business needs to give its agent an identity, set spending rules, verify intent, enforce human-in-the-loop controls, and maintain an audit trail. That’s what Ralio does,” he says.
As such, the startup is “complementary to what the networks are building, not competing with them.”
Bennani Laafiret previously scaled revenue operations at fintech unicorns Alan and B2B software LumApps. He co-founded Ralio with fellow industry veteran Leonardo Rosales, CTO, who rebuilt payment infrastructure for Tier 1 banks at Form3.
It was the founders’ deep industry expertise and proven commercial execution that made them a compelling bet for Barry Downes, managing partner at SVV.
“This is category-defining infrastructure for agentic payments and exactly the type of opportunity we look for at SVV,” says Downes.
Ralio will use the funds to develop its core platform and grow its engineering team in London. The co-founders are set to make their first hires of two founding engineers and one founding associate, bringing the team to five.
Finance is a global industry and Ralio’s hires will reflect that, per Bennani Laafiret. “We don’t treat diversity as a policy but we rather default to it as payments need those different angles. As we grow, we’ll continue hiring for breadth of perspective alongside technical depth,” he says.
Peek inside the pitch deck here:
