Grand raised $5M to build the trust network for the real-world economy

Today we're announcing that Grand has raised $5M in funding led by 20VC, with participation from NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures) and Firedrop.

This is a milestone for us, but this post isn't just about the raise. It's about the mission we set out to achieve and what it means for the people we're building this for.

The problem we set out to solve

Global trade exceeds $15 trillion annually. Everyday, suppliers and buyers across construction, manufacturing, and wholesale make credit decisions that shape their businesses, whether to offer terms, how much to extend, whether to trade at all.

Behind every one of those decisions is someone's ambition. A contractor ready to take on their biggest project. A supplier betting on a new market. A buyer scaling from five jobs a year to fifty. Trade credit isn't just a financial instrument,  it's the mechanism that decides whose ambition gets to move forward. Something that important deserves better than stale data and a gut feeling.

Yet most of these decisions are still made on fragmented data that can be months or years out of date. A Companies House filing from 18 months ago. A credit score that reduces an entire business into a single number. Trade references chased by phone and email. The full story exists, it's just scattered across five different tools that don't talk to each other.

The industry has spent decades building tools to protect suppliers from downside. Nobody built the tool that tells the full story, one that's current, continuous, and trustworthy to match the weight of the decisions it informs.

What Grand does differently

Grand Profile, our core product, uses AI to give suppliers a continuous, real-time view of the businesses they trade with. Instead of static reports, we model how companies actually behave over time, drawing on financial data, banking signals, payment patterns, and operational indicators to build a living credit picture.

But the real shift isn't just better data. It's what we do with it.

Our AI layer doesn't just show credit teams information, it tells them what it means. Which applicants to approve, at what limit and why. Which existing customers are ready for more. Which accounts are showing early warning signs. The credit manager still makes the call, but they're making it with intelligence that's current, continuous, and complete, rather than piecing together fragments from five different tabs.

The team behind it

Grand was founded by Kirk Donohoe, Dave Brown, and Eamon Doyle. The three of us have worked together for over a decade, first at Mastercard Labs, then as co-founders of WhenThen, a payments orchestration platform we sold to Advent International in 2022. Grand is our third company together, and our most ambitious.

We've spent our careers building infrastructure that moves money. Grand is infrastructure that builds trust networks for B2B trade, and we believe that's the bigger opportunity.

What our investors see

We didn't just want capital. We wanted partners who understood the scale of what we're building.

Kieran Hill at 20VC put it well: "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."

Claude Ritter at NAP saw the long-term compounding effect: "Every trade interaction deepens the network's intelligence. That kind of defensibility is rare in B2B."

What's next

The funding will go toward three things: growing our engineering and data science teams, expanding coverage across European markets, and deepening the AI capabilities that make Grand fundamentally different from legacy credit tools.

We're launching in the UK construction, a £215.7 billion industry, before expanding into manufacturing, wholesale, and trade services. Our near-term product helps individual suppliers make better credit decisions. But every decision that flows through the platform adds to a shared intelligence layer, a trust network where commercial reputation compounds over time and travels with the business.

The long-term vision is a trade economy where credit decisions are fast, fair, and grounded in how businesses actually behave, not how they appeared in last year's filing. Where suppliers grow by extending with confidence, and buyers earn trust that follows them from one relationship to the next.

We're just getting started. And we're hiring. If this sounds like the kind of problem worth solving, we'd love to hear from you.

— The Grand team