Ryft, a payments startup, has raised £20 million in a Series B round led by Gresham House Ventures, with participation from existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital. The investment will support expansion across Europe and the US, and will speed up product development and a move upmarket towards high-growth and enterprise organisations.
Founded in 2021, Ryft builds payment solutions for marketplaces, platforms and multi-location businesses. With a single integration, customers can manage seller onboarding and complex transaction flows, including recurring billing, automated split payments and cross-border payouts. Merchants can also generate additional revenue from the transactions processed. Since launch, Ryft has partnered with payment companies including Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Nuvei.
Over the past 12 months, Ryft tripled its processing volume. More than 6,500 businesses now use its payment system, including Epos Now, Chaiwalla, the Disasters Emergency Committee, Daytrip and Sprive. According to Gresham House Ventures, the platform's best customers are growing their volumes by more than 100% a year. Alex Mackenzie, Richard Kirby and Sadra Hosseini, who serves as CEO, founded the business.
As part of its European expansion, Ryft has applied for a full EU licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA), which would allow it to passport its services across the European Economic Area. The round comes amid growing focus on the UK's ability to build homegrown technology companies that can become global leaders, and a broader push from European policymakers to strengthen the region's sovereign payments infrastructure.
Ryft's success is a vote of confidence in Manchester's thriving fintech sector and shows how British businesses can start, scale and compete on the global stage. This Government is backing the industries and companies like Ryft that are creating jobs, attracting investment and driving good growth in every postcode.
This round of investment means we can take what we've built in the UK into new European markets and compete on the global stage. Payments have been dominated by a small number of incumbents for a long time. We want to provide a powerful and efficient alternative to businesses, not just in Europe, but globally.
Modern commerce runs on platforms, from marketplaces and franchises, to creators, and, in time, AI agents, but the payments foundation beneath it was built for a two-party world that no longer exists. Ryft is the rare UK-built, FCA-regulated fintech designed for multi-party payments from the ground up, and its best customers are compounding volumes over 100% a year on the platform. As commerce shifts to instant, multi-party platforms and increasingly agent-initiated payments, ownership of the infrastructure rails becomes a question of national economic sovereignty, not just merchant cost. We're backing Ryft because the UK needs domestic champions with payment architecture for the next era of commerce, and Ryft is one of them. Sadra, Alex, Richard and the wider team are executing at an impressive pace, and we are proud to back this category-defining Manchester fintech!
Splitting a payment cleanly between multiple parties is slow, technical, heavily regulated work, which is precisely why the incumbents left it half-served for a decade, and precisely why it was worth building properly. We first met Sadra in 2024 and Ryft has since done everything he said it would in that first meeting. Plenty of founders can grow quickly for a year, but not many are deliberately building a team and a culture that will still be compounding in five. This is the third time we have backed Ryft, and our largest investment in the company to date.
