Ryft Raises £20m to Expand Payments Platform Across Europe and US.

Manchester-based payments company Ryft has raised £20 million in a Series B round led by Gresham House Ventures, to support expansion across Europe and the US.

Existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital also took part, Ryft said. The company didn’t disclose a valuation. Ryft describes the round as the largest UK payments Series B of the year, a claim made by the company rather than independently checked against every other round in 2026.

Payments for complex flows

Ryft builds payment infrastructure for marketplaces, platforms and multi-location businesses, supporting seller onboarding, recurring billing, automated split payments and cross-border payouts through a single integration, the company said.

The company says more than 6,500 businesses use its system, including Epos Now, Chaiiwala, the Disasters Emergency Committee, Daytrip and Sprive, and that processing volume has tripled over the past 12 months.

“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,” said Sadra Hosseini, Ryft’s chief executive and co-founder, in the company’s announcement. “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.”

Rohit Mathur, partner at lead investor Gresham House Ventures, said the payments infrastructure beneath modern commerce “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,” he said, adding that as commerce shifts towards “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.”

Fred Ursell, head of investments at Pembroke Investment Managers, another existing backer, said splitting a payment cleanly between multiple parties was “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.” He said this was Pembroke’s third investment in Ryft and its largest in the company to date.

A cautious funding market

The raise comes as UK fintech investment has fallen to its lowest half-year level since 2016. Funding fell to £1.8bn across 205 deals in the first half of 2026, down from £5bn across 281 deals in the same period last year, according to KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech report. The figure was also below the £735m recorded in the first half of 2016, when the report began.

Hannah Dobson, KPMG’s UK fintech lead, described the start of 2026 as challenging, with investment levels similar to those seen during the first wave of the pandemic. She said artificial intelligence was one of the few areas still attracting significant investor interest: AI-related UK fintech deals reached £445m across 79 deals in the first half of the year, a quarter of total investment, up from 16% a year earlier.

European regulatory expansion

Ryft already operates as an FCA-regulated payments firm in the UK. It has applied for a full payments licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority, which the company says would let it passport services across the European Economic Area. An application isn’t an approval: Ryft cannot passport services through Malta until the MFSA grants the licence.

Lucy Rigby, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said Ryft’s raise was “a vote of confidence in Manchester’s thriving fintech sector” and showed how British businesses could “start, scale and compete on the global stage.”

Ryft was founded in 2021 by Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby, and says it has gone on to partner with Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Nuvei. The company said the new funding would go towards further product development, the European and US expansion, and building products aimed at larger enterprise customers.