Dublin’s Grand raises $5m pre-seed for ‘real-world’ payment network

Dublin’s Grand has raised $5m in a pre-seed funding round led by 20VC, with participation from NAP and Firedrop.

Grand describes itself as the “the AI-powered trust network for real-world industries” like construction, manufacturing and trade supply. Now it says the $5m funding round will drive UK expansion and accelerate product development, as it builds its intelligent payment network designed to help businesses evaluate and onboard trade partners with confidence.

Co-founded by payments veterans Kirk Donohoe, Dave Brown and Eamon Doyle, this is the team’s third venture together. They originally worked together at Mastercard Labs and co-founded WhenThen, the payments orchestration platform that was later acquired by Advent International-owned MangoPay in 2023.

“Businesses don’t need another credit score,” said Kirk Donohoe, CEO and co-founder of Grand. “They need always-on intelligence about how their partners actually behave. Poor credit intelligence doesn’t just misprice risk. It misprices opportunity.

“By applying AI to fragmented and often unstructured data across industries like construction and trade supply, we can move from hindsight to foresight and allow payments and capital to flow based on real trust.”

According to Grand, B2B trade across industries like construction, manufacturing and trade supply exceeds $15trn globally, but the credit decisions that underpin it still rely on fragmented data that is often months or years out of date.

“Creditors make high-stakes calls on outdated snapshots,” Grand said.

It cited the example of the UK, where statutory accounts filed at Companies House can be over a year old by the time they are used, and where over 25,000 company insolvencies were declared in 2023. Unsecured creditors in those failures typically recovered little to nothing, according to Grand.

Grand Profile, the company’s first product, is designed to show how businesses behave over time, not just how they report, offering a continuous view and flagging early signs of rising risk or improving reliability as they arise.

“Businesses in global trade are making high-stakes decisions – who to partner with, who to pay, who to trust – based on legacy data and processes,” said Kieran Hill, general partner at 20VC.

“Kirk, Dave and Eamon have already built and exited together in payments; they understand the infrastructure layer, and Grand is their most ambitious play yet.”

Already available to UK customers, Grand said it will use this round of funding to grow its engineering and data science teams, expand coverage across European markets, and “deepen the platform’s AI capabilities”.

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