Building the Trust Layer for Agentic Payments: Ghali on the Griffin Uncut Podcast
Our Cofounder & CEO, Ghali, on the trust layer between AI agents and payment providers, and what comes next!
Our Cofounder and CEO, Ghali, recently sat down with Mo Baker from Griffin, on Griffin Uncut to discuss Ralio's $2.5M pre-seed, the emerging category of agentic payments, and what it takes to make AI agents trustworthy with money. Here are the highlights.
Origin story and the why payments
Ghali started his career in law firms and consulting before moving into business operations roles at several scaleups, some of which became unicorns. That experience led him to want to build a product around optimising how companies actually run internally. The initial idea was a tool to help businesses manage their software spend.
The Ralio idea took shape at Antler. Talking with a coach in the programme, Ghali realised that software itself was about to change shape: agents would replace many of the SaaS tools companies depend on today. The real blocker wasn’t building the agents, it was payments. How do you safely let an AI agent pay for things on your behalf?
That same afternoon, his now Cofounder Leo, who had spent years building payment infrastructure with major banks, posted in the Antler cohort asking who was working on agents and payments. Ghali chased him down in the office. Ralio was born.
"The element blocking the agents from actually being more autonomous is how do you safely make them pay. That's how we met with my Cofounder Leo."
What agentic payments actually means
Ghali defined the category in one line: a payment not initiated by a human, and not by a piece of deterministic software, but by a non-deterministic AI agent acting on behalf of a user or business.
He broke the space into three categories:
Consumer agentic commerce: agents shopping on behalf of consumers (the ChatGPT-buys-your-shoes scenario).
Agent-side payments: agents paying for the tools, APIs, and content they need to do their own work.
Business payments: agents running B2B financial workflows on behalf of companies.
Ralio focuses on the third.
"There's the consumer side, there's the agent side, and then there's the business side. We specifically work on the third."
What Ralio does
Ralio sits as a trust layer between the people building agents and the payment providers who execute the payments. When an agent wants to make a payment, say paying an invoice, there are dozens of points where things can go wrong: did it read the invoice correctly? Is the beneficiary someone you recognise? Is the amount right? Does the agent have the right spend limits?
Rather than asking every team building agents to solve all of this themselves, Ralio abstracts the guardrails: identity for each agent, spend limits, audit logs, and a clean integration layer with payment providers, who weren’t built to handle non-deterministic actors in the first place.
"When you hit send, are you as a business going to trust the agent to pay exactly the right amount, in the right currency, to the right person? No."
The guardrails problem
Models hallucinate, and they’ll keep hallucinating even as they improve. But the more subtle risk Ghali highlighted is that agents trained to be helpful can do dangerous things in a payment flow.
His example: an agent attempts a payment, doesn’t get a clear confirmation that it succeeded, and helpfully retries, five times. The supplier just got paid five times over.
There are also bugs you don’t anticipate. In testing, Ralio has seen agents convert pounds to pence and back to pounds, multiplying the payment amount by 100. The takeaway: you can’t simulate agent behaviour the way you simulate human behaviour. Agents act differently, and the infrastructure has to be designed around how they actually behave, not how a human would.
"Most of our focus is on the agent behaviour, not on what they mimic. I don't care how close it is to a human. I care about how it acts."
The three seasons of agentic payments
Ghali framed how the category will unfold in three “seasons”:
Season 1 (today): Businesses use agents to run existing payment workflows; invoices, payroll, supplier payments. Ralio is already dogfooding this internally.
Season 2: Agentic commerce layers on top; employees use agents to book travel, buy supplies, and shop within company spend controls.
Season 3: Agent-to-agent negotiation; invoices aren’t just paid, they’re negotiated. Due dates, payment terms, and disputes get handled between agents on both sides.
"Most of the businesses in the world are yet to be born. Think of one born a year or two from now; they don't even know what a UI could look like, or how you used to do things."
The $2.5M pre-seed and advice for founders
On raising in AI: it’s both a blessing and a curse. Investors are actively hunting for solutions in the space, but every day brings another announcement of something adjacent to what you’re building.
Ghali’s advice for founders: don’t chase the hype. The most important thing is what makes you the right person to go after this specific problem. Timing matters, too early or too late both kill you, but the personal “why” is what sustains the work as the challenges compound.
“You cannot remove timing from a founder story, it’s almost impossible. Who you are and why you’re coming after this will never change. A lot of other things will.”
Big thanks again to Mo Baker and the Griffin team for hosting Ghali!
Listen to the full conversation →
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