The Story of Gr4vy: Building the Future of Payment Infrastructure

Sometimes the most unexpected career paths lead to the most innovative solutions. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, John Lunn shared how his journey from marine biology to payments led to founding Gr4vy, a company reimagining how enterprises handle payment infrastructure.

From Ocean Science to Internet Payments

“I was based in the UK at the time and there wasn’t a lot of people employing marine biologists,” John recalls. His solution? “I taught myself to code and kind of right place, right time.” This pivot led him into the wild west days of early internet payments, where he helped launch CyberSource in 1997, “probably their first Internet payment company.”

The late ’90s tech scene was transformative. “It was wild, like, it was crazy,” John remembers. “We were pioneers on the edge of something brand new. It was sort of shoestrings and pirates and all the rest of it.” These early days provided crucial insights into payment infrastructure challenges: “We were inventing something that never been done before on a medium that was brand new… trying to take a legacy system and make it work with something new, which was the Internet.”

The PayPal Years

After CyberSource’s successful sale to Visa, John’s journey led him to PayPal, where he became “employee four outside North America 16 years ago” and helped build it “from a very bad idea to pretty successful company over the next 14 years.” His time there, including running part of PayPal’s venture capital arm, gave him unique insights into payment innovation bottlenecks.

The Birth of Gr4vy

These experiences revealed a persistent problem: “Payments are really hard,” John explains. “Every retailer in the world has this payments team or group of individuals that are out there trying to put all the spaghetti together.” The redundancy was striking: “Everyone’s doing the same thing independently with custom code.”

This observation led to Gr4vy’s founding thesis: “Why don’t we build a tool we can give to any retailer, merchant, shopping cart, bank that allows them to 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.”

A Different Approach to Infrastructure

Gr4vy’s innovation lies in its infrastructure-as-a-service 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 approach is resonating with the market. The company is “doubling month on month” in transactions and has “tripled in the last quarter” in revenue, despite challenging market conditions.

The Vision Ahead

Looking to the future, John sees Gr4vy becoming “the central point of integrations for retailers around the world with their payment types.” His vision is clear: “When you go and create a website and you want to sell things online, you’ll go, okay, the logical place to start is Gr4vy from a payments perspective.”

For retailers struggling with the complexity of modern payment systems, this vision offers a compelling promise: focus on your core business of selling products, not on navigating the “hellscape” of payments infrastructure. After all, as John puts it, “if you’re a shoe retailer, you should be selling shoes, not trying to navigate the hellscape that is payments.”

The story of Gr4vy is more than just another fintech tale – it’s about recognizing that sometimes the most valuable innovations come from streamlining the complex systems that everyone has learned to live with, but nobody particularly enjoys managing.