Ryft Raises $27 Million in Manchester to Challenge Legacy Payment Infrastructure

Manchester-based Ryft raised £20 million, roughly $27 million, in a Series B round led by Gresham House Ventures, with returning investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital participating. PXN Ventures joined through the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II.

Ryft builds payment infrastructure for marketplaces, software platforms and multi-location businesses that need to split one customer payment among several recipients, handling merchant onboarding, split payments, recurring billing, payouts and increasingly cross-border settlement. It is, in the company's own framing, payments plumbing, the unglamorous infrastructure layer that becomes extremely valuable once customers build their businesses around it and switching costs rise accordingly.

Ryft says processing volume tripled over the past year and that more than 6,500 businesses now use the platform, with partnerships across Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Nuvei. The company recently added foreign-exchange conversion and payouts across more than 35 currencies. The new capital will push Ryft into continental Europe and the United States, and the company has applied to the Malta Financial Services Authority for a full EU payments license that, if granted, could be passported across the European Economic Area, giving Ryft regulatory reach well beyond its UK home market from a single license.

The round also points to a theme increasingly visible across payments infrastructure investing: as software agents become more capable of initiating transactions on behalf of people and businesses, the systems underneath still need to know who is authorized, how funds should be divided, which rules apply and where money ultimately settles. The interface on top of a transaction may become conversational or automated, but the underlying financial logic and regulatory obligations do not disappear, which keeps regulated infrastructure providers like Ryft relevant regardless of how the front end of commerce evolves.

The pending Malta license is worth understanding on its own terms. Rather than pursuing separate regulatory approval in each EU country it wants to serve, Ryft is following the well-established path of securing one license from a single EU member state regulator and passporting it across the European Economic Area, a strategy several UK and international fintechs have used since Brexit complicated direct UK-to-EU regulatory recognition. If granted, the license would let Ryft serve customers across the EU from a single compliance framework, materially lowering the cost of the European expansion this round is meant to fund compared with pursuing country-by-country licensing.

Founders building fintech, payments or marketplace infrastructure can find relevant investors through AngelLinx's match tool and browse active opportunities on the live listing. Learn how Series B rounds are typically structured in our learn center, explore the full investor directory, or catch up on more funding coverage in the newsroom. Ready to raise your own round? Register on AngelLinx.

AngelLinx Intelligence | angellinx.ai