Ralio, a London-based FinTech startup building a payments platform tailored for business AI agents, has announced a €2.1 million ($2.5 million) pre-Seed funding round to further develop its core platform and expand its engineering team in London.
The oversubscribed funding round was led by SVV (Sure Valley Ventures) 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.
Ghali Bennani Laafiret, cofounder and CEO of Ralio, commented, “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.”
Founded in 2025 by Ghali Bennani Laafiret and Leonardo Rosales, Ralio is the trust layer for agentic business payments. The company is making it safe and easy for AI agents to make payments.
According to the company, while AI agents are becoming increasingly autonomous, existing payment rails were designed for humans, requiring manual authentication, approval flows, and human-centric fraud logic. All existing workarounds for enabling agentic transactions pose considerable financial and reputational risks, states Ralio.
Ralio provides a dedicated payments layer that embeds guardrails, identity verification and audit trails into agentic transactions. The UK startup claims that this infrastructure enables businesses to trust their AI systems to move money safely and accountably across various payment rails, including bank transfers, cards and stablecoins.
Explaining how Ralio differs from other agentic finance products, the company notes that those products decide what customers’ agents do, whereas Ralio decides whether it should happen. It claims to be the mandatory checkpoint that verifies intent, enforces rules, and logs every decision before a single payment moves.
Adam French, Partner at Antler, commented, “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.”
Backed by Antler from day one, Ralio’s pre-Seed round was 3x oversubscribed within three months of founding.
