at the start of my freshman year at boston college, i was paired up with a random roommate will messina, who ended up becoming one of my closest friends (we lived together all four years of college, and for three years post-grad as well). will and i were some of the only people actively starting companies freshman year at bc (and were the only two freshmen accepted into the bc’s entrepreneurship club accelerator), so it’s pretty lucky that we were paired up as roommates.
will is building a company called grailpay, and i thought i’d write out some thoughts on how i understand his business, the market, and other companies in the space. as of the time of writing (october, 2025), grailpay has raised $6.7m in seed funding led by construct.
GrailPay’s vision is to build the “Visa / Mastercard for B2B payments” - a real-time bank payments bureau that can later expand to other payment rails like RTP and FedNow. “Bank-to-bank payments” is a large and growing market in need of risk tooling innovation, as $100+ billion in ACH payments fail annually. GrailPay’s first wedge product was ACH payment processing, which allowed the company to gather enough data to build risk products on top of that data. Now, the company offers “account intelligence” and “transaction intelligence” products to mid-sized financial services firms, and aims to grow its proprietary dataset of transaction history to achieve network effects and become the dominant B2B payments risk company. ACH isn’t going away any time soon, but GrailPay believes it must be brought into the digital age and has a first-mover advantage in the space. Following a capital raise to expand the sales organization and prepare the current infrastructure to scale up, GrailPay could become a franchise fintech data network in the next five to ten years.
further reading: jeremy @ nyca wrote a thoughtful piece calling for a better business credit bureau that is worth checking out