Manufacturers, construction firms, food distributors, healthcare providers, logistics operators. These businesses process enormous volumes of invoices, approvals, and payments every single day, and most of them are doing it with tools that haven't meaningfully improved in decades.

Zoom in more and you’ll find the accounts payable function is the point at which these organisations are particularly exposed to fraud, errors, and operational slowdowns. A single misdirected payment or fraudulent invoice can cost the business hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Accounts payable has long forced finance teams into a trade-off. Automation promises speed. But moving invoices through a business faster can also mean fewer opportunities to catch errors, suspicious activity and fraud. Adding more control usually means adding more friction. The category has largely optimised for one side of this equation. Traild was built around the insight that finance teams should not have to choose.

This tension is particularly acute for mid-market companies in real-world industries: too large for basic accounting software, too small for custom enterprise systems. Many run on deep, industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as Acumatica, SYSPRO, Epicor, IFS and SAP Business One, the operational backbone of entire industries.

Individually these platforms can look small. But collectively they have a very long tail, supporting hundreds of thousands of businesses and enormous payment flows.

But they are harder to integrate with and less attractive to serve one by one, so most AP solutions typically focus on a handful of large cloud ERPs instead. That leaves a large installed base running the real economy stuck with PDF invoices, manual approvals and limited fraud protection.

Enter Traild.

Traild is an accounts payable platform purpose-built for the real economy. Founded in 2018 by Adam Laitt and Brad Smorgon, it automates invoice capture, manages complex approval workflows, and provides financial control and fraud prevention, all deeply integrated into the systems these businesses actually run on.

The product spans the full accounts payable workflow, all underpinned by data and machine learning capabilities that improve as more transactions are processed:

Adam and Brad’s path to founding Traild was rooted in firsthand experience, which crystallised their conviction that the mid-market businesses most exposed to these risks were also the least well served by existing tools.

We're proud to be investing alongside Square Peg and other investors who share our conviction in the team and the opportunity.

The conventional view is that the long tail of mid-market ERPs is too small, too fragmented and too difficult to be worth the effort. As a result, many AP solutions cluster around the few large, modern platforms with clean public APIs.

Traild took a non-consensus view: that these ecosystems were attractive precisely because others avoided them and surprisingly large in aggregate. It built a differentiated product for this lower competition environment. Where competitors often force customers to trade off efficiency and control, Traild delivers both, combining machine learning across extraction, approvals and fraud detection with integrations deep enough to feel native to the ERP.

Ecosystem after ecosystem, Traild is often the only modern AP product that integrates deeply enough to solve the customer's problem properly. Each platform may look niche in isolation; together, they form a large market.

Traild has developed a strong GTM playbook for entering ERP ecosystems, pairing direct sales with partnerships across the relevant players in each one. The playbook has now travelled across multiple platforms and, importantly, geographies, gaining strong traction in North America and Europe alongside its foundation in Australia and New Zealand. There is substantial headroom within the ecosystems it already serves, and a clear path into many more.

That repeatability is evidence of how the team executes: strategically and methodically, breaking growth into repeatable, scalable engines rather than chasing one-off wins.

Traild's defensibility is multi-layered, and each layer strengthens with scale. The first is integration: once Traild is wired into a customer's ERP and daily workflow, switching becomes costly. The second is distribution: the reseller and ecosystem partnerships that carry Traild into each market make displacement harder still, because a challenger has to win over not only customers but the partners already invested in Traild's success.

The third layer is the one that compounds. Traild's fraud and control layer builds a picture of risk from the activity flowing through the platform, learning what is normal for each customer and how each supplier behaves, verifying suppliers where it can and flagging those it cannot. Every invoice and payment sharpens that picture, so the more activity Traild sees, the better its fraud detection becomes. It is also the hardest layer to copy, because this kind of control has to be engineered in from the start rather than bolted on later, and the result is a position that only gets harder to dislodge as Traild grows.

Traild's core product provides a powerful wedge from which to expand vertically into B2B payments and more deeply into the financial workflow.

Customers already use Traild to receive, interpret, approve and review invoices. Allowing them to execute the payment through the same platform is a natural completion of that workflow. Traild's trusted position at the point where payment decisions are made gives it an advantage over standalone payment providers and creates an opportunity to participate in the economics of the transaction.

Payments also strengthen the core product. As more transactions flow through the platform, Traild gains a richer dataset across payment behaviour, supplier networks, fraud patterns and cash-flow cycles. That context can improve financial control and make its machine learning systems more powerful.

The further AI opportunity is significant. Machine learning already underpins invoice interpretation, workflow automation and fraud detection. Traild also sits at the intersection of invoice, approval, supplier, ERP and payment data, the context an AI agent needs to handle routine finance tasks, surface actionable insights and escalate anomalies safely.

Richer data enables smarter AI, strengthening the core product and allowing Traild to expand further into the workflow. The team is investing heavily in AI and data R&D to capitalise on that opportunity.

Competition will keep shifting. ERP platforms could build or embed their own AP features, larger AP providers could move down into Traild’s segment, foundation models have made basic invoice capture easier to build, and some of Traild’s edge in legacy systems may narrow as the long tail of ERPs migrates to the cloud.

What reassures us is that Traild’s moat does not rest on invoice capture or any single integration. The depth of its ERP integrations, its handling of complex vertical workflows, and its fraud data network are much harder to replicate. A general-purpose AI model does not, by itself, have the customer, supplier and workflow context that Traild accumulates through the platform.

Traild is also increasingly diversified across ecosystems and geographies, already integrates with leading cloud ERPs, and can migrate with customers as their underlying systems change.

Plenty of software businesses sit close to large transaction flows, but proximity does not automatically translate into payments revenue at scale. Moving from workflow software into funds flow introduces a different set of operational, regulatory and commercial challenges, and several strong software companies have stumbled in the transition.

Traild starts from a strong position. It already sits in the approval and control layer where payment decisions are made. But turning that position into a reliable, scalable payments business is the next thing to prove.

Traild combines many of the characteristics we look for in a best-in-class software company: a large, structurally underserved global market, a repeatable and scalable go-to-market playbook, and multi-layered defensibility that strengthens with scale.

We are backing Adam, Brad and the Traild team to keep executing with precision and ambition, across both their proven playbook and their expansion into payments and AI-enabled financial workflows, becoming the AI financial control layer for the real economy.