Ryft has raised £20m in a Series B funding round to expand its payments platform across Europe and the US as the Manchester-based fintech targets larger marketplace and enterprise customers.
Gresham House Ventures led the investment, with participation from Pembroke VCT, Ingenii Capital, and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II. The round will support Ryft’s international expansion and its move into larger accounts after a period of rapid growth in the UK.
Founded in 2021, Ryft provides payment infrastructure for marketplaces, digital platforms, and multi-location businesses that need to manage transactions involving more than a conventional buyer and seller. Its technology covers seller onboarding, recurring billing, automated split payments, and cross-border payouts through a single integration.
The company has worked with payment providers including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Global Payments. Gresham House Ventures said Ryft has tripled in size over the past 12 months and that more than 6,500 businesses now use its payments system.
That growth gives Ryft a larger base from which to pursue European expansion, but moving into additional markets creates a different set of operating demands. Payments companies have to manage regulation, merchant onboarding, fraud controls, card-network requirements, currency handling, and local payment preferences while maintaining reliability at increasing transaction volumes.
The Series B is therefore partly an infrastructure investment. Ryft’s proposition centres on allowing platform businesses to embed payments into their own products rather than sending users into a separate transaction environment.
Marketplace models make that requirement more complicated. A single customer payment can need to be divided between several sellers, commissions retained by the platform, funds held until conditions are met, and different parties paid at different times. Conventional merchant-acquiring systems were largely designed around simpler two-party transactions.
The growth of embedded payments has encouraged software companies to treat transaction processing as part of their own commercial proposition. Platforms can use payments to generate additional revenue, strengthen merchant relationships, and reduce the number of external services customers need to manage.
That opportunity has also made payments infrastructure increasingly competitive. Large global providers have expanded their own products for marketplaces and software platforms, while newer fintech businesses concentrate on segments where specialist onboarding, settlement, or transaction architecture can provide an advantage.
Ryft is attempting to build its position from the UK while competing in that broader international market. Its expansion strategy will take the company into jurisdictions where established payments groups already have substantial scale, local licences, and merchant relationships.
The funding round gives it additional capital to absorb the cost of expansion before new markets contribute materially to revenue. Internationalising a regulated financial technology platform requires compliance systems, commercial partnerships, technical integrations, and customer support to operate within local requirements.
The company is also targeting larger enterprise accounts, which can increase payment volumes substantially but place greater demands on uptime, reporting, integration flexibility, and service agreements. Enterprise customers typically have more complex internal systems and longer procurement processes than the smaller businesses that help many fintech platforms establish their first customer base.
Investor interest reflects the continuing shift towards platform-based commerce. Marketplaces are now common across retail, services, hospitality, mobility, creator businesses, and business-to-business sectors, while franchise and multi-location models create similar requirements for routing payments between different entities.
Artificial intelligence could eventually add another transaction channel if software agents increasingly initiate purchases or business processes on behalf of users. That remains at an early commercial stage, but it adds to demand for payment infrastructure capable of managing transactions in which the relationship between buyer, platform, and ultimate seller is more complex than a traditional card payment.
Ryft’s challenge is converting those structural trends into durable market share. Payment infrastructure can become deeply embedded once integrated, giving providers recurring transaction volumes, but winning those integrations requires customers to trust a supplier with a function that directly affects cash flow and end-user experience.
The Manchester base also gives the funding round a regional dimension. The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II participated alongside private investors, placing growth capital into a technology company whose international expansion is being developed outside London’s larger fintech cluster.
Ryft now has additional funding to test whether its UK growth can be repeated overseas. Regulatory execution, larger customer wins, and the reliability of more complex international transaction flows will determine how far the business can extend its position beyond its domestic market.
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