From PayPal to Gr4vy. John Lunn, a leading executive with Paypal (NASDAQ: PYPL) during his time leading the company’s Developer and Start-up Relations division, has come back to the payments business with a new firm, Gr4vy.
After that stint in 2015-16, Lunn became a partner in PayPay Ventures until early 2020. In late 2020, he launched Gr4vy, a cloud-native payments company. The company announced a $11.1 million Series A funding round led by Nyca Partners with participation from Activant Capital, Global Founders Capital and Firestartr. Total company funding is now $12.2 million.
“At Gr4vy, we accelerate digital transformation by integrating the advantages of cloud computing into payment orchestration. Our innovative platform provides a seamless way for retailers to manage payments without the need for added infrastructure or payment teams,” said Lunn, founder and CEO. “We are the only payment orchestration platform built natively in the cloud. With our infrastructure and tools, retailers can expand and control their payment stack from anywhere.”
Lunn said Gr4vy is “payment service provider agnostic.” It serves as a conduit between retailers and their payment providers. Its payment orchestration platform (POP) allows retailers to quickly pivot.
“Retailers can mix and match providers, payment methods and route their transactions without being locked into a single ecosystem,” Lunn said. “This agility and flexibility ensures retailers never have to lose a customer or transaction again.”
Gr4vy offers what it calls Instances – individualized infrastructure in the cloud – that it can quickly “spin up” to meet business requirements from the most simple to the most complex.
“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 optimize 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.
Through Gr4vy’s cloud-native POP, retailers can deploy across the globe and even on the Edge to ensure their customers always have the payment solutions and options they need regardless of location, the company said. Centralized reporting, monitoring and management are all part of the streamlined system.
Gr4vy said its key features offered to retailers include:
- Unprecedented flexibility: Gr4vy empowers retailers with the flexibility to give their customers the payment options they prefer. The platform enables retailers to easily connect, test and deploy processors, alternative payment methods and services in a few clicks.
- Customized workflows: Gr4vy’s No-code workflow engine allows retailers to build workflows that optimize transaction routing based on country, currency, time of day and create workflows to reroute transactions due to downtime. Retailers can also design workflows to offer specific payment methods based on day of the week, time of day, or location, and Gr4vy Embed will automatically reflect these inputs in the checkout experience.
- PCI1 Certified Gr4vy Vault: Gr4vy’s Vault allows retailers to move fluidly across current and future payment service providers, storing and securing customer payment details.
- A universal API: Gr4vy’s API allows retailers to integrate once and access new payment types and functionality without code changes.
- An easy modern checkout: By integrating Gr4vy Embed into their existing checkouts, retailers 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 retailer’s payment methods, providers, workflows and conditions. This allows team members to contribute to the payment stack, freeing up the development team to focus efforts where they’re needed most.
- Centralized transaction reports: Gr4vy offers a single hub for monitoring and managing consolidated transaction reports across all a retailer’s service providers.
“As investors focused on the future of commerce infrastructure, we’re eager to continue working with John and the Gr4vy team as they simplify payments orchestration for merchants and marketplaces of all sizes,” said Steve Sarracino, founder and partner at Activant Capital. “Gr4vy’s platform offers customers a seamless ‘payments team in the cloud’ while removing friction for consumers – a winning formula in the increasingly digital future of commerce.”
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