Gr4vy Is Revolutionising the Payment Infrastructures for Merchants
Gr4vy’s Rapid Growth in the Payment Industry
From San Mateo, California, with a team and presence in London, Fintech and Payments startup Gr4vy was founded by John Lunn, Ali Minaei, and Cristiano Betta. The trio who enjoyed working together at PayPal at different times wanted to do it again, says Founder & CEO, John Lunn. So they teamed up, as Minaei as the CTO and Betta as the CPO, to form their own company, Gr4vy, in 2020.
Officially launched in April 2021 after closing a Series A funding round of $11.1M—led by Nyca Partners with Activant Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Firestartr—the startup’s growth speed is remarkable. Gr4vy has raised $12.2M in total funding and continues to build revenue whilst rapidly expanding its product and services.
In June 2021, Gr4vy announced the successful completion of PCI1 Certified Vault status, allowing merchants to move fluidly across their current and future payment service providers, storing and securing customer payment details.
Gr4vy keeps on building its strong bench of executive team members, having hired Zubin Vandrevala as Vice President of Partnerships, Sales and Business Development. In addition, it assembled a 25-member team of payments industry pioneers and experts from Adyen, Braintree, Cybersource, Google, Paypal, Recurly, Spreedly, and Yoyo Wallet. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that John Lunn helped start Cybersource and PassMark Security among his contributions to PayPal (in Europe) and PayPal Ventures.
Gr4vy has partnered with Banked and GoCardless to integrate the payment service providers (PSPs) into its platform, so merchants’ customers have payment options to pay directly from their bank account.
In November 2021, Gr4vy launched a new, verified Gr4vy Magento extension and partnered with Akoova, Europe’s leading Magento hosting provider, to be the first to bring Gr4vy’s Magento extension to market.
Even though Gr4vy grew faster than most startups around, the founders emphasised the importance of patience. “We learned to take the time to do it right, or it will come back to hurt you later; also, when it’s right, it opens a load of doors that you hadn’t even noticed,” they told Startups of London. Remember that the company was founded in 2020, but the official launch was in April 2021. So obviously, Lunn and friends practised what they preached, and it paid off well. If you want to learn more about Gr4vy’s journey, listen to our podcast with Founder & CEO John Lunn.
A Unique Payment Infrastructure Solution for Merchants
Throughout his 21 years in the payments industry, John Lunn kept seeing the variety of payment methods leading merchants to build increasingly complex payment infrastructures that require dedicated in-house payment teams. But, even then, it would take months, sometimes years, to implement new payment functionalities. A series of conversations with retailers ignited the idea to develop a cloud-native payment orchestration platform, stated Lunn and added, “the final straw was when one retailer was quoted millions of dollars and 12 months for every new payment type they wanted to add in LATAM.”
Payment companies have been building tools to process payments, but they haven’t provided the infrastructure to manage and scale those services. This gap eventually created an environment where merchants employed large, complex payment teams to support and manage their payment stacks. Recognising there was a better way, John and his co-founders created Gr4vy.
Gr4vy is the only payment orchestration platform built natively in the cloud, which was the biggest challenge, according to founding members. “We decided to build the product as cloud technology and not just use the cloud, so we have built a serverless stack that is cloud-agnostic,” they said to Startups of London.
The infrastructure allows merchants to expand and control their payment stack from anywhere. In addition, the company’s intuitive, cutting-edge POP leverages the power of the cloud to modernise payments infrastructure. It empowers merchants to streamline and manage payment methods, services and transactions all in one place—without the hassle or need for large payment teams.
How Does Gr4vy Help Retailers
As a conduit between merchants’ shopping carts and PSPs, Gr4vy’s POP orchestration layer upgrades merchants’ payments stacks. As a result, merchants gain the ability to add payment providers, create workflows and adjust payment routing conditions, all without the need for complex coding—making them and their infrastructure more agile.
Gr4vy replaces the existing infrastructure, powering merchants’ payments and creating individualised Instances through a single-tenant cloud infrastructure, which acts as merchants’ payment stacks in the cloud.
Merchants can spin up the individualised cloud Instances from the most simple to the most complex requirements without sharing server load and the resulting slowdowns. As a result, there is no risk of a single point of failure holding back their business. Additionally, Gr4vy integrates once, no matter which payment service merchants use or how many Instances they need, allowing them to expand their business and scale.
Merchants can also deploy across the globe by spinning up Edges to their cloud instances to ensure their customers always have the payment solutions and options they need regardless of location. With Gr4vy, merchants never have to lose a customer or transaction again.
The outcome is a genuinely modern cloud-native POP that takes the complexity out of merchants running payments infrastructure, freeing them to focus on their business and customers.
On top of all, Gr4vy designed a few key benefits and features for the platform.
A Universal API
Gr4vy’s Universal API allows merchants to integrate once and access new payment types and functionality without code changes.
Unprecedented Flexibility
Gr4vy’s platform enables merchants to easily connect, test and deploy processors, alternative payment methods and services in a few clicks.
An Agnostic Approach
Gr4vy is platform and payment service provider agnostic. As a result, merchants can mix and match providers, payment methods and route their transactions without being locked into a single ecosystem.
An Easy Modern Checkout
Gr4vy allows merchants to individualise their checkout experience. By integrating Gr4vy Embed into their existing checkouts, merchants can automatically update their checkout page and reflect specific payment methods without rewriting code.
No-code Admin Gives Control to Everyone
Gr4vy’s intuitive no-code admin controls all of a merchant’s payment methods, providers, workflows and conditions. It allows team members to contribute to the payment stack, freeing up the development team to focus their efforts where they’re needed most.
Centralised Transaction Reports
Gr4vy offers a single hub for monitoring and managing consolidated transaction reports across merchant service providers.
Conclusion
Having launched recently, Gr4vy is currently in the process of onboarding new customers. However, the company has already garnered praise.
“Very few people in the world have as much experience and insight in international payments as John and his team. And their vision of what is needed for merchants is spot-on: a cloud-native tool to let businesses orchestrate and optimise their payments using their intuitive interfaces (no engineering!), robust security, and simple, seamless implementation. Much easier than managing today’s menu of complex, multiple payment platforms. It’s inspirational to work with the founding team at Gr4vy, and we are looking forward to watching their growth,” said Hans Morris, managing partner of Nyca Partners.
Gr4vy aspires to be the go-to destination for developers, retailers, merchants and businesses when thinking about payments. It’s Gr4vy’s vision that banks, gateways, and anti-fraud companies will offer their services through the Gr4vy marketplace, and through Gr4vy have the freedom to select the setup that meets their business needs without being restricted by technology. The company aims to be the platform of choice by which all merchants, retailers, developers and businesses deploy payment infrastructure worldwide. Why? Because Gr4vy is the only payment orchestration platform built natively in the cloud giving you scale and control of your payment stacks from anywhere.
For more information about Gr4vy, please visit https://gr4vy.com/.
