Manchester payments platform Ryft has secured £20m in Series B funding as it prepares to accelerate its expansion across Europe and the US.
The investment comes on the same day Ryft’s head of growth, Callum Bentley-Edwards, joined leaders from Auto Trader and UrbanChain at Prolific North’s Regional Tech Champions Breakfast: Greater Manchester to discuss the challenges of scaling a business.
The round has been led by Gresham House Ventures, with backing from existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital. The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II has also invested.
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Ryft builds payment technology for marketplaces, platforms and multi-location businesses, helping customers manage complex transaction flows including automated split payments and cross-border payouts.
The FCA-regulated company now serves more than 6,500 businesses and said its processing volumes had tripled during the past year.
Ryft has also applied for a full EU payments licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority. If approved, it would allow the business to passport its services across the European Economic Area.
Founded in 2021 by Sadra Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby, Ryft emerged from the founders’ experience of building and selling marketplace app Butlr. The trio developed the platform after encountering limitations with existing payment providers while scaling their previous business.
Ryft, which was included in Prolific North’s 2026 Tech Companies to Watch scale-up list, previously raised £5.7m in Series A investment.
Chief executive and co-founder Hosseini said the company wanted to challenge the dominance of “a small number of incumbents”.
“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,” he said.
Ryft’s partners include Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard and American Express, while the Disasters Emergency Committee is among the organisations using its technology.
Rohit Mathur, partner at Gresham House Ventures, said: “Modern commerce runs on platforms, from marketplaces and franchises, to creators, and, in time, AI agents, but the payments foundation beneath it 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.”
Fred Ursell, head of investments at Pembroke Investment Managers, added: “Splitting a payment cleanly between multiple parties is 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.”
Economic secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby described the fundraising as “a vote of confidence in Manchester’s thriving fintech sector and shows how British businesses can start, scale and compete on the global stage”.
“This government is backing the industries and companies like Ryft that are creating jobs, attracting investment and driving good growth in every postcode,” she added.
The valuation attached to the funding round has not been disclosed.
