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I haven’t dived headfirst into the world of running my own AI agents yet.

I simply have nothing in my life I want to automate so much that I’d risk a piece of software creating a catastrophic problem in my life while I was sleeping.

And even if I wanted to, Apple is currently sold out of Mac Minis, probably for obvious reasons (he says, glaring at the OpenClaw hype).

But AI agents aren’t going away, and making them work safely is a priority before they can really take off.

If you want an agent to handle your business payments, Ralio is betting you’ll want its technology in place. Read on to find out more.

But first:

• Baltic Ventures is looking for startups for its 2026 accelerator programme. “Up to 12 places. Three months of intensive support. A programme valued at £40,000. An initial £25,000 equity investment from the Baltic Ventures Angel Syndicate, plus the opportunity for £75,000 in follow-on funding.” Apply here

• GP Bullhound held its annual Northern Tech Awards last week and previous PreSeed Now startups Literal Labs and UrFuture were among the winners

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Ralio wants to make it safe to let AI agents loose in your bank account

Whether you’re the kind of person who hotfooted it down to the Apple Store to buy a Mac Mini the day OpenClaw launched, or the kind who is watching from the sidelines, there’s no disputing that AI agents have come a long way in the past few months.

Given examples like the Meta employee who almost lost all her emails due to an overzealous agent, caution is smart when it comes to exploring the capabilities of this latest flavour of AI.

But at the same time, there could be real benefits to letting agents handle things like payments… if only they could be trusted. The last thing you want is an agent that runs payroll three times in a day, or not at all…. Or pays the wrong amount for invoices. At the most extreme, it could be ruinous.

At the very least, it’s a hassle most businesses don’t need.

Enter Ralio, which pitches itself as letting you “trust your agents with business payments”.

“Agents can directly process payments. You just give them an API key to your business bank account and they can do it. The main issue isn’t a technical one, it’s ’how can I trust an indeterministic system to run actions within either my computer or my systems?”, explains Ghali Bennani Laafiret, co-founder and CEO at Ralio.

Ralio sits between people building agents and the banks and payments services they want to integrate with.

The product allows agents to be given guardrails like specific accounts an agent can interact with, spending limits, transaction rate limits, and a list of authorised payees. It also has protection against use by unauthorised agents, and an audit trail that shows everything your agent has done. This part of the product is intended as a regulatory compliance tool, showing how and why an agent made the payments it did.

The story so far

Laafiret has a background in strategy consulting and handling revenue operations for scaleups.

He says he first got to know the crossover between technology and payments while working at consumer contracts company Papernest, at the end of what we could call the ‘pre-AI era’. He then moved to work for French companies in revenue operations roles.

Charged with ensuring his employers had friction-free routes to growing their revenue, he spotted an opportunity, if not a specific startup idea. Signing up with Antler, he explored ideas and teamed up with Leonardo Rosales, who is experienced in building payments technology.

The advent of AI agents provided the perfect starting point for Ralio, which the pair founded in summer 2025.

Earlier this month, the startup launched its product, allowing agent builders and payment providers alike to sign up and start working with it.

And Ralio eats its own dogfood, as the saying goes:

“We run our own internal payments thanks to our platform. That’s saved us tremendous amounts when it comes to all the subscriptions that we used to have to run different processes,” Laafiret says.

He says the goal over the next few months is to expand the number of banking services the platform integrates with. The sell here is letting payments companies offer something Ralio predicts business customers will increasingly want: safe and reliable support for their AI agents.

The startup will also refine its support for agents over the coming months.

“We're pioneers in this space. We're enabling the first business agent payments. So our goal is to create that wave,” Laafiret says.

“We have something to prove to us, to the market, to everyone, around what a tremendous shift agents are providing. It changes how we’re going to see business payments going forward.”

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