ACH payments moved over $86T last year alone, serving as the backbone of the US financial system, yet fraud, credit risk, and operational failures still plague bank payments, while manual reviews and legacy tooling fail to address these issues adequately. Credit cards have benefited from decades of innovation in risk infrastructure, but bank payments have not seen the same advancement, creating a critical gap in the modern financial ecosystem. GrailPay closes that gap by building a modern intelligence platform that detects and prevents risk across the entire ACH lifecycle, before companies initiate transactions. The company’s platform delivers predictive analytics and real-time signals across account enrollment, transaction monitoring, and merchant underwriting, helping payment platforms, lenders, fintechs, and software vendors reduce failed payments, accelerate decisioning, and automate operations. Businesses can adopt their modular tools with or without using GrailPay for payment processing, giving companies flexibility when seeking intelligence-driven risk management. The platform currently powers ACH risk tooling and infrastructure for more than 10,000 businesses
AlleyWatch sat down with GrailPay Cofounder & CEO Will Messina to learn more about the business, its future plans, and recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised $6.7M in seed funding. The fundraise was led by Construct Capital, joined by Commerce Ventures, Broadhaven Ventures, Soma Capital, and a network of experienced fintech operators and angels. This follows an initial fundraise led by Noemis Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that GrailPay offers.
GrailPay is a risk and intelligence platform for bank payments. We help originators of ACH payments reduce fraud, avoid failed ACH transactions, and move money more confidently—through tools that span account validation, transaction monitoring, underwriting, and payment processing.
What inspired the start of GrailPay?
ACH moves trillions each year but often still operates like it’s the 1970s—manual reviews, high return rates, and outdated infrastructure. We saw the need for Visa-level risk and data infrastructure built specifically for bank payments, and GrailPay was born from that gap.
I started the business coming out of my dorm room. I didn’t have a credit card and didn’t understand why some consumers got such great perks with their credit cards and everyone else was left to the wayside. One thing led to another and when you go a mile deep in ACH, you start to find the big opportunities!
How is GrailPay different?
We’re not just another processor. GrailPay’s platform delivers real-time risk signals and predictive intelligence, built specifically for ACH. Our tools are modular—meaning customers can plug into our data without switching processors. It’s flexibility with power to make bank payments fundamentally better under the hood for anyone who touches them.
What market does GrailPay target and how big is it?
We serve payment platforms, fintechs, lenders, and B2B software vendors—anyone moving money via ACH or needing account-level risk infrastructure. The ACH network alone moved $86T last year, and bank payments are only going to continue to grow with the rise of faster payments and the risk infrastructure to match.
What’s your business model?
GrailPay generates revenue through a mix of SaaS and usage-based pricing across its intelligence tools and payments stack.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
We’ve focused on core infrastructure from day one—mission-critical tools that directly impact revenue, fraud, and operations. In a tighter economy, the value of reducing payment failures and automating risk decisions becomes even more important. When cashflow tightens, the need for faster payments only grows.
What was the funding process like?
The funding process was relationship-driven and conviction-led. We are fortunate to work with investors who understood both the complexity and urgency of modernizing ACH. There’s a lot of noise in fintech, but when you’re solving real infrastructure problems, the right partners tend to lean in with strong conviction.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Clarity of category. ACH isn’t sexy, but the pain is real. It took focus to frame the narrative—not as “just another payments company,” but as the infrastructure powering trust and intelligence behind every bank-based transaction.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Strong technical team, real market pull, and a clear wedge into a massive but underserved infrastructure problem. ACH failures cost real money, and our early traction showed we could meaningfully reduce that risk.
Strong technical team, real market pull, and a clear wedge into a massive but underserved infrastructure problem. ACH failures cost real money, and our early traction showed we could meaningfully reduce that risk.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We’re focused on product expansion—shipping deeper capabilities in our account validation, monitoring, and underwriting tools. We’ll also be expanding our GTM efforts and continuing to onboard fast-growing fintech and payments customers.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Stay close to real customer pain. The best products are the ones that remove friction, reduce cost, or drive revenue. If you’re doing one of those things well, someone will pay for it—even in a downturn.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re heads-down on execution: growing the team, scaling the platform, and helping more businesses trust ACH. The opportunity to become the default risk infrastructure for bank payments is wide open, and we’re chasing it. We’re growing quickly and we need to keep doubling down on what we do best.
What’s your favorite spring destination in and around the city?
Any roof of a friend is unmatched! It’s hard to beat a sunny day with friends on a rooftop.
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