Manchester's Ryft, a payments infrastructure startup built to untangle the mess of splitting money between multiple parties on digital platforms, has closed a £20 million Series B round led by Gresham House Ventures. The raise, with participation from Pembroke VCT, Ingenii Capital and NPIF II via PXN Ventures, marks what Ryft calls the largest UK payments Series B of 2026, though it declined to disclose the valuation to Sky News.
For CEO Sadra Hosseini, the funding validates a bet he and his co-founders made when they left behind Butlr, a marketplace app they'd grown to around 1 million users before selling it to OrderPay. "Modern commerce runs on platforms," Hosseini told Sky News, "but the payments foundation was built for a two-party world that no longer exists."
He has a point. Ryft now processes transactions for more than 6,500 businesses and saw its transaction volume triple year-over-year, according to FinTech Global. The company's pitch centers on a problem many marketplace operators know well: splitting a payment cleanly between multiple sellers, handling their onboarding and compliance checks, managing escrow accounts, and doing it all without building a labyrinth of internal tooling.
The company holds an FCA Authorised Payment Institution license and offers APIs that automate payment splits, seller onboarding with KYC verification, segregated escrow accounts, and recurring billing. Its customers range from point-of-sale provider Epos Now to group gifting platform GiftRound, and even the Disasters Emergency Committee, according to Ryft's recent announcement.
Hosseini launched Ryft in 2022 alongside managing director Alex Mackenzie and CTO Richard Kirby, the same trio behind Butlr. They secured FCA authorization that year and brought their first client live in November 2021, moving quickly in a market where regulatory approval can drag. The company has since raised capital in stages: a £1.7 million seed round led by SFC Capital in 2023, followed by a £5.7 million Series A in April of last year led by EdenBase, with backing from the British Business Bank through NPIF, GPOS Investments, and several other investors, according to Tech.eu.
The new capital arrives at a tricky moment for UK fintech. Investment in the sector reportedly fell to £1.8 billion in the first half of last year, the lowest total in a decade, according to KPMG's Pulse of Fintech report. Ryft is competing in a space dominated by Stripe Connect and Adyen for Platforms (the rebranded MarketPay), both of which offer similar split payment flows and seller onboarding. The company also lists Mangopay and Lemonway as competitors in a blog post comparing marketplace gateways.
Still, Ryft is betting it can carve out share by focusing on what Hosseini describes as "slow, technical, heavily-regulated work" that larger players sometimes treat as an add-on feature. The startup recently launched an omnichannel platform unifying online and in-person payments with integrated reporting, drawing follow-on investment from existing backers Pembroke VCT and Ingenii VC ahead of the Series B.
Now the company plans to use the fresh capital to expand into Europe and the United States. Ryft has filed for a payment institution license with Malta's MFSA, which would enable regulated operations across the European Union. It has partnerships in place with Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Nuvei, Clearhaus and Worldpay, according to the announcement.
The company operates from offices in Manchester's Spinningfields district and currently employs between 51 and 200 people, according to LinkedIn. "This round means we can take what we've built in the UK into new European markets and compete on the global stage," Hosseini said in the announcement, a measured claim in a market where American giants still command most of the mindshare.
Whether Ryft can challenge incumbents in a capital-constrained environment remains to be seen. But for now, the company has the runway to find out.
