Dublin-based team behind the WhenThen exit to Advent International launches AI platform to help businesses know who they’re trading with across a $15 trillion industry.

London, United Kingdom — 26th of March — Grand, the AI-powered trust network for the real-world industries like construction, manufacturing, and trade supply, today announced it has raised $5M in pre-seed funding led by 20VC, with participation from NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures) and Firedrop. The round will fund Grand’s UK expansion and accelerate product development as the company builds its intelligent payment network that helps businesses evaluate and onboard trade partners and transact with trust and confidence.

Built by payments veterans

Grand was co-founded by Kirk Donohoe (CEO), Dave Brown, and Eamon Doyle. They have worked together for over a decade, including at Mastercard Labs and as co-founders of WhenThen, a payments orchestration platform acquired by Advent International in 2022. Grand is their third venture together.

The problem

B2B trade across industries like construction, manufacturing, and trade supply exceeds $15 trillion globally, yet the credit decisions that underpin it, whether to offer terms to a trade account, pay upfront before goods are delivered, increase or extend credit or whether to trade at all, still rely on fragmented data that is often months or years out of date. Creditors make high-stakes calls on outdated snapshots. 

In the UK, statutory accounts filed at Companies House can be over a year old by the time they are used. The UK recorded more than 25,000 company insolvencies in 2023, the highest in three decades, and unsecured creditors in those failures typically recovered little to nothing.

The cost is not only downside risk. When businesses lack reliable, current intelligence on their trade partners, they move slowly, delaying onboarding, constraining order sizes, or avoiding relationships altogether. Suppliers under-extend to customers who are already growing. Buyers hesitate to commit to suppliers they cannot properly assess. The result is missed opportunity across the entire trade chain.
 

What Grand does today

Grand Profile, the company’s first product, shows how businesses behave over time, not just how they report. Instead of static snapshots, it provides a continuous view, flagging early signals of rising risk or improving reliability as they emerge.

Businesses use Grand to assess their trade partners, whether customers, suppliers, or service providers. The platform helps teams evaluate new relationships before committing, and continuously monitor existing ones for signs of growth so they can proactively extend more to customers already trending in the right direction. 
 

Investors

“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. 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.”

— Kieran Hill, 20VC
 

“Grand’s model creates compounding value: every trade interaction deepens the network’s intelligence. That kind of defensibility is rare in B2B.”

— Claude Ritter, NAP
 

CEO comment

“Businesses don’t need another credit score. 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.”

— Kirk Donohoe, Co-founder & CEO, Grand

Long-term vision

Grand believes a shared trust network can lay the foundation for a broader payment network across industries like construction and trade supply, where companies can discover partners, extend credit, and transact with greater trust and confidence.

Use of funds

The funding will be used to grow Grand’s engineering and data science teams, expand coverage across European markets, and deepen the platform’s AI capabilities. Grand is now available to UK customers in manufacturing, construction wholesale and supply, trade services and beyond.