Inside Gr4vy’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service Gambit: Reimagining the Payment Orchestration Model
The payment orchestration industry had a problem: everyone was building the same thing, over and over again.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, John Lunn, CEO and Founder of Gr4vy, revealed how reimagining payment orchestration as infrastructure-as-a-service rather than SaaS created a new category in enterprise payments.
The Payment Infrastructure Challenge
The problem was clear: “Every retailer in the world has this payments team or group of individuals that are out there trying to put all the spaghetti together,” John explains. “Everyone’s doing the same thing independently with custom code.”
The traditional solution was to build a SaaS platform. But John saw a fundamental flaw in this approach. Retailers needed more than just software – they needed infrastructure that could scale with their business.
The IaaS Innovation
Gr4vy’s breakthrough came from rethinking the delivery model. “Unlike anyone else in this space, the way that we do orchestration is infrastructure as a software service rather than a SaaS service,” John explains. “You don’t connect to Gr4vy for Gr4vy to do your orchestration. Gr4vy rolls out instances of Gr4vy for you within your same region, your same area that allows you to manage orchestration.”
This architectural choice solved multiple enterprise challenges simultaneously:
- Regional compliance requirements
- Data sovereignty concerns
- Performance optimization
- Scalability needs
Why Infrastructure Matters
The decision to build infrastructure rather than just software came from deep understanding of enterprise needs. “If you’re a shoe retailer, you should be selling shoes, not trying to navigate the hellscape that is payments,” John notes.
This insight led to a solution that could “add remove change payment methods, route how they flow, determine how to get into a new country, accept the local payment types without needing this big army of engineers and this big payments team.”
Impact on Growth
The infrastructure approach has proven transformative. The company is “doubling month on month” in transactions and has “tripled in the last quarter” in revenue. But perhaps more importantly, it’s enabled a different kind of customer relationship.
“The rise in volume is not because we’re adding hundreds and hundreds of new clients,” John explains. “It’s because we’re growing with the customers we’ve got today.” Their infrastructure model enables this growth: “You talk to a Gr4vy customer, they’ll say, Gr4vy feels like it’s part of our team, and that’s by design.”
Lessons for Technical Founders
Gr4vy’s infrastructure gambit offers several key insights for technical founders:
- Question industry assumptions about delivery models
- Consider infrastructure implications of scale early
- Build for enterprise requirements from day one
- Enable customer growth through architecture choices
Their experience shows that sometimes the key to category leadership isn’t just building better software – it’s fundamentally rethinking how that software is delivered and operated.
Looking ahead, this approach positions Gr4vy to achieve their vision of becoming “the central point of integrations for retailers around the world with their payment types.” Their journey demonstrates that in enterprise software, architectural decisions about delivery models can be just as important as feature decisions.
For technical founders building enterprise solutions, Gr4vy’s infrastructure-first approach offers a compelling alternative to the traditional SaaS playbook. Sometimes the best way to solve an industry problem is to change the infrastructure that created it in the first place.