Ryft: The Fintech Built Inside a Marketplace — And Now Powering Thousands

Every investor loves a founder who has lived the problem they’re solving. Ryft is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen. What started as a marketplace pain-point has grown into one of the UK’s most compelling payments-infrastructure stories — and the pace of their progress since raising capital has been nothing short of impressive.

This isn’t a story about payments. It’s a story about infrastructure built from real-world frustration, and why investors should pay attention.

From Butlr to Ryft — The Origin Story That Matters

Before Ryft existed, the founders were running a fast-scaling hospitality marketplace called Butlr. It grew to over a million users — impressive, but behind the scenes was a mess of payment limitations.

Split payments were clunky. Compliance was painful. Merchant onboarding slowed growth. Costs were high.

Rather than accept that ecosystem, they built what they wished existed: Ryft — a payments stack designed for multi-vendor platforms from day one.

That founder–problem fit still defines the company today. It’s why their product is sharp, practical, and commercially aligned with how modern marketplace businesses actually operate.

Building Their Moat — Licensing, Compliance, and Merchant Growth

By 2022, Ryft had secured their Financial Conduct Authority licence and built their own compliance infrastructure. That alone separates them from many early-stage payments companies.

The result?

A platform that not only processes transactions but handles the complexity of:

• split and delayed payouts

• multi-party settlement

• embedded revenue models

• PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance

• automated seller onboarding

  
  

Fast-forward to today and Ryft is supporting 1,500+ merchants, with marketplace clients reporting up to 70% savings on existing payment fees.

Cost savings get attention. Compliance reduces friction. Embedded revenue turns the payment stack into a profit centre.

That combination is why adoption has accelerated so quickly.

After the Raise — Traction, Talent and Omnichannel Expansion

Ryft’s 2025 Series A took them to £7.4m total funding. What’s notable is this: they’d already reached break-even before the raise.

To me, that’s a marker of discipline and strong unit economics — characteristics investors value in a fintech environment where efficiency matters more than ever.

Since then, Ryft has:

• expanded its team across engineering, sales and compliance

• moved into Europe

• launched a full omnichannel payments platform

• grown its merchant base further with hybrid online/offline clients

  
  

The omnichannel launch is particularly important. It gives them a far bigger addressable market — retail groups, hospitality chains, franchise networks, PropTech platforms, and any business where online and on-premise transactions need a single reconciliation layer.

It’s the kind of functional extension that shifts a company from “useful” to “necessary”.

Why Ryft Caught My Eye as an Investor

Three things stood out to me early on — and they’ve only strengthened since:

1. They’ve lived the problem. They’re not theorising about marketplaces. They built one and felt the pain directly.

2. They’re infrastructure, not a feature. Payments is noisy, but regulated marketplace-ready infrastructure is a different category with far deeper defensibility.

3. Their economics scale cleanly. As more marketplaces adopt embedded payments, Ryft benefits from broader behavioural shifts, not just individual customer wins.

They’re solving a structural gap in modern commerce — and doing it efficiently.

Looking Ahead — A Clear Path to Significant Value

Payments is a £3.5 trillion global market. Marketplace and platform payments are its fastest-growing segment.

With European expansion underway, a strong regulatory foundation, and increasingly large clients coming online, Ryft has a realistic line of sight to a £200m–£300m valuation within the next few years, based on fintech infrastructure revenue multiples.

You don’t need to squint to see the opportunity.

Ryft was built out of genuine frustration — the best origin for any product. Today it sits at the intersection of marketplace growth, embedded finance, and scalable compliance. For investors, that makes it one to watch closely.