Ralio, the payments platform purpose-built for AI agents, has secured a £1.8m pre-seed funding round.
The oversubscribed round was led by Sure Valley Ventures (SVV) with participation from venture funds Seed X, Love Ventures, Plug and Play, rule30, Adeline Arts and Science, Endurance Ventures, Campus Fund, fintech investor Alan Morgan and continuous investment from Antler.
Ralio says existing payment rails were designed for humans, requiring manual authentication, approval flows and human-centric fraud logic. To remedy this for the modern age, the startup provides a payments layer that embeds guardrails, identity verification and audit trails into agentic transactions.
It says this infrastructure helps businesses to trust their AI systems to move money using various payment rails including bank transfers, cards and stable coins.
With its platform, Ralio hopes to unlock a new wave of B2B efficiency where autonomous systems can manage complex financial workflows without human bottlenecks.
The pre-seed funding will be used to further develop Ralio’s core platform and expand its engineering team in London.
“AI agents are no longer just productivity tools – they are becoming autonomous economic actors capable of procuring services and managing capital,” says Ghali Bennani Laafiret, cofounder and CEO at Ralio. “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.”
