Manchester-based Ryft has closed a £20m (€23m) Series B led by Gresham House Ventures, with existing backers Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital following on. The round is roughly three and a half times the size of the company's €6.6m Series A in April 2025.
Ryft sells payments infrastructure to marketplaces, platforms and multi-location operators. A single integration covers seller onboarding, subscription billing, the automated splitting of a transaction between several parties, and payouts across borders. The company dates from 2021, was set up by Sadra Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby, and holds FCA authorisation.
Terms of the round beyond the headline figure were not disclosed, including the post-money valuation. Both Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital, on the cap table since the Series A, took part again, so the existing shareholder base has held its position rather than been diluted out by the new lead.
The operating numbers behind the raise: Ryft says it has tripled processing volume over the past 12 months and now serves more than 6,500 businesses, among them Epos Now, the Disasters Emergency Committee, Chaiwalla, Daytrip and Sprive. It has partnerships with Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Nuvei.
Rohit Mathur, partner at Gresham House Ventures, said Ryft's strongest customers were compounding volumes at more than 100 per cent a year, and framed the investment in infrastructure terms: "Ryft is the rare UK-built, FCA-regulated FinTech designed for multi-party payments from the ground up."
The capital funds expansion into Europe and the United States, product development and a push upmarket. Ryft has applied to the Malta Financial Services Authority for a full EU licence, which would let it passport services across the European Economic Area — the regulatory step that turns a UK payments business into a continental one without a licence application in every member state.
Chief executive and co-founder Sadra Hosseini said the money would let Ryft "take what we've built in the UK into new European markets", and pitched the company as an alternative in a category he characterises as long controlled by a handful of large incumbents.
The deal drew comment from the Treasury. Lucy Rigby, economic secretary, called it "a vote of confidence in Manchester's thriving FinTech sector".
Ryft joins a busy year for European payments infrastructure. Comparable 2026 rounds include €86.2m for London's Primer, €83m for British cross-border firm Sokin and €37m for Amsterdam's Silverflow. Several of the larger announcements in the category have gone to UK-headquartered companies — though Ryft is one of the few not based in London.
Original source: EU-Startups — https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/09/uk-fintech-startup-ryft-secures-e23-million-to-accelerate-european-expansion/
