Ralio, a payments platform purpose-built for AI agents, has raised £1.8 million in a pre-seed round led by Sure Valley Ventures, with participation from Seed X, Love Ventures, Plug and Play, rule30, Adeline Arts and Science, Endurance Ventures, Campus Fund, Alan Morgan and Antler. It is building payments infrastructure tailored for AI agents to operate across B2B financial workflows, with the funding to be used to further develop its core platform and expand its engineering team in London.
As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, existing payment rails remain designed for human use, requiring manual authentication, approval flows and human-centric fraud logic. Ralio provides a dedicated payments layer that embeds guardrails, identity verification and audit trails into transactions, allowing businesses to trust autonomous systems to move money securely and accountably across bank transfers, cards and stablecoins.
Backed by Antler from day one, the pre-seed round was three times oversubscribed within three months of founding. The investment marks the largest agentic payments round in Europe to date, positioning Ralio as the foundational infrastructure for a new era of autonomous economic actors. CEO Ghali Bennani Laafiret previously scaled revenue operations at multiple unicorns including fintech Alan and B2B software LumApps, while CTO Leonardo Rosales rebuilt payment infrastructure for Tier 1 banks at Form3.
AI agents are no longer just productivity tools, they are becoming autonomous economic actors capable of procuring services and managing capital. However, the world of finance is still built for human intervention. Ralio is building the missing layer that makes agentic finance safe and scalable for the enterprise. This funding will allow us to accelerate our product development and ensure that as AI begins to transact, it does so within a framework of total accountability.
AI agents are increasingly executing autonomous transactions, but payment infrastructure still relies heavily on human oversight - creating real regulatory and financial risk. Ralio is building the payments infrastructure layer to address this - embedding verification and compliance directly into agentic payments. What stood out was Ghali and Leo's unique combination of deep payments expertise and proven commercial execution. This is category-defining infrastructure for agentic payments and exactly the type of opportunity we look for at SVV.
Ralio is tackling one of the most significant challenges in the next decade of AI adoption. For AI to reach its full potential, it must be able to move value safely. We backed this team because they have the domain expertise to bridge the gap between legacy payment systems and the future of autonomous finance. Their progress since founding just a few months ago has been exceptional, and we are proud to support them as they build a new category in fintech.
