- Manchester’s Ryft raised £20 million in a Sequence B led by Gresham Home Ventures.
- UK fintech funding fell to £1.8 billion within the first half of 2026, the bottom in a decade.
- Ryft tripled its processing quantity this 12 months and now serves over 6,500 companies.
UK fintech funding fell to £1.8 billion within the first half of 2026, the bottom stage in a decade. Ryft, a Manchester funds firm constructed to separate a single transaction amongst greater than two events, picked this second to lift £20 million.
Gresham Home Ventures led the Sequence B, with present backers Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital returning. It’s Ryft’s third funding spherical since 2021 and, by its personal depend, the biggest UK funds Sequence B of the 12 months.
“This spherical of funding means we are able to take what we’ve constructed within the UK into new European markets and compete on the worldwide stage. Funds have been dominated by a small variety of incumbents for a very long time. We wish to present a strong and environment friendly different to companies, not simply in Europe, however globally,” stated Sadra Hosseini, Ryft’s co-founder and chief govt.
Three founders, three rounds since 2021
Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie, and Richard Kirby based Ryft in 2021, after Hosseini and Mackenzie offered Butlr, a mobile-ordering app for pubs and bars, to OrderPay.
The corporate is predicated in Manchester and has now raised cash 3 times: a £1.2 million seed spherical in 2022, a £5.7 million Series A led by EdenBase in April 2025, and this £20 million Sequence B. That takes its complete funding to round £27.4 million.
Ryft plugs into buying banks and offers them the instruments to separate a cost, maintain a part of it in escrow, and pay out a number of events on completely different schedules, all by way of a single integration.
For instance, a market promoting tickets on behalf of lots of of unbiased promoters can take its fee at checkout, maintain the remainder till the occasion, then pay every promoter robotically, as an alternative of reconciling lots of of payouts by hand.
Splitting funds the place Stripe and Adyen don’t
Stripe Join and Adyen nonetheless dominate this finish of funds, and neither is standing nonetheless. London’s Primer closed a $100 million Series C in May 2026, taking its complete funding to $170 million, to construct an AI layer throughout the funds stack. Paymentology, a card issuer-processor, raised $175 million the same month to push into stablecoins and tokenisation. Airwallex landed $320 million in June at an $11 billion valuation, greater than a 3rd increased than six months earlier, to chase what it calls agentic funds.
Towards these stability sheets, Ryft is staying slim: constructing just for multi-party flows, a distinct segment the 2 largest incumbents nonetheless deal with as an add-on relatively than a core product.
The global embedded payments market, where this kind of infrastructure sits, was worth an estimated $24.7 billion in 2024 and is forecast to develop greater than 30% a 12 months by way of 2034, in response to International Market Insights.
Gresham Home Ventures, which manages round £800 million throughout its enterprise and VCT funds, has beforehand backed firms together with advertising analytics platform Ask Bosco and medical trials enterprise Panthera Biopartners, the latter exited earlier this 12 months after greater than doubling its income. That is its third funding in Ryft.
Rohit Mathur, Gresham Home Ventures associate, framed the deal in broader phrases than a typical funds spherical.: “Fashionable commerce runs on platforms, from marketplaces and franchises, to creators, and, in time, AI brokers, however the funds basis beneath it was constructed for a two-party world that not exists. Ryft is the uncommon UK-built, FCA-regulated fintech designed for multi-party funds from the bottom up, and its greatest prospects are compounding volumes over 100% a 12 months on the platform.”
Fred Ursell, head of investments at Pembroke Funding Managers, whose agency has now backed Ryft 3 times, put it extra bluntly: “Splitting a cost cleanly between a number of events is sluggish, technical, closely regulated work, which is exactly why the incumbents left it half-served for a decade, and exactly why it was price constructing correctly.”
A report spherical in a 12 months funding collapsed
Ryft has tripled each its dimension and its processing quantity over the previous 12 months. Greater than 6,500 companies now use the platform, together with Epos Now, the Disasters Emergency Committee and journey platform Daytrip, and it has partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, American Categorical and Nuvei.
The brand new capital will fund its push into Europe and the US, together with an utility for a full EU funds licence from the Malta Monetary Companies Authority, which might let it function throughout the European Financial Space with out a separate licence in every nation.
A £20 million spherical doesn’t settle whether or not multi-party funds turns into a class Stripe and Adyen merely take up, or one slim sufficient {that a} UK-built rail can personal outright. What occurs with Ryft’s Malta utility, and whether or not agentic funds prove to wish genuinely completely different rails or only a quicker model of those that exist already, will say extra about that than this spherical does.
