Ryft has raised a £20m Series B, led by Gresham House Ventures, to take its payments product for marketplaces and platforms into Europe and the US. The round follows a £5.7m Series A in April 2025. Ryft has also applied for a payments licence in Malta, which it can passport across the European Economic Area (EEA). According to Ryft, more than 6,500 businesses use it today and its processing volume tripled over the past year.
Ryft's product is at a high level comparable to what Stripe and Adyen offer the same platforms and marketplaces. So why would a platform pick the small Ryft over the giants Stripe or Adyen? Ryft belongs to a small group of European providers betting that platforms are better served by infrastructure built for them from day one. The challengers' argument is that Stripe and Adyen are great payment companies but they added platform features later and most of their technology and company DNA is still focused on the direct-to-merchant offering.
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Ryft, Rootline and Embed: the three European challengers
Ryft is based in Manchester and was founded in 2021 by Sadra Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby. It is an FCA-authorised payment institution, and since a UK licence does not passport into the EEA, the Malta application is its route into the EEA. The product covers acceptance, automated split payments with commission set per seller, seller onboarding with KYC, escrow and delayed payouts, with FX and payouts in more than 35 currencies added in September. Customers include Epos Now, Daytrip and Sprive.
Rootline is based in Amsterdam and started life as June Technologies, with a team rooted in Adyen: co-founder Rutger de Waard spent eight years as Adyen's SVP Sales and Felix Koeslag was an Adyen tech lead. It has held a payment institution licence in the Netherlands since March 2023, including merchant acquiring, passported to all 31 EEA countries. The product combines online and in-person payments, split payments, platform fees and transaction-level reconciliation in one API. Customers include Preo and Orderli, and Rootline has not disclosed any funding.
Embed is also based in Amsterdam and was founded in 2022 by Alex Schoonkind, Andrei Valeanu and Konstantin Indjov (check my podcast episode with Alex). It holds a Dutch payment institution licence passported across the EEA and a UK small e-money institution registration. The product targets vertical SaaS with ecommerce and POS acceptance in one integration, balance accounts for multi-party flows and domestic virtual IBANs across Europe. In June, OpenFX, a stablecoin-based cross-border payments network, agreed to buy Embed, subject to approval from DNB and the FCA.
Why money movement matters more than acceptance
From my point of view, the three challengers build their product around money movement, the part that happens after a payment is accepted. That part is easy to underestimate, so let's take a vertical SaaS platform for gyms. A member pays a monthly fee by card or direct debit, and for most payment providers the job ends there. For the platform, the job-to-be-done is just getting started. The gym's share has to land in the gym's account, the platform keeps its software fee and a margin on payments, and perhaps a personal trainer working out of the gym needs paying separately, in addition to refunds and chargebacks that have to come out of the right balance. At month end, every euro has to reconcile back to the original transaction. Yes, Stripe and Adyen cover these flows too, but their platform products still carry the logic of a direct merchant account, while the three challengers start from the split, the balance and the payout.
