Ryft raises £20M Series B to take marketplace payments beyond the UK

Ryft, the Manchester fintech building payment infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms, has raised a £20M Series B led by Gresham House Ventures to expand across Europe and into the US – a round the company calls the largest UK payments Series B of 2026.

European fintech has spent two years hearing that the money has moved on to AI, and payments especially is supposed to be a settled market where the incumbents won. And yet the year’s biggest UK payments Series B has just landed – not in London, but in Manchester. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it sells into, and what a record cheque signed in the North says about where UK fintech is heading.

A £20M cheque signed in the North, not the City

Ryft announced the £20M Series B on 17 September 2026. Gresham House Ventures, the growth equity arm of asset manager Gresham House, led the round, with existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital returning; BusinessCloud also lists NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance, managed by PXN Ventures, among the participants. The company presents it as the largest UK payments Series B of the year, a claim carried by Tech Startups and FinTech Global, with Sky News independently confirming the raise.

The money has a clear destination. “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,” CEO and co-founder Sadra Hosseini told BusinessCloud. Ryft has applied for a full EU licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority to passport across the European Economic Area, and the plan runs through product development and a move upmarket alongside the geographic push.

Split payments for 6,500 businesses

Founded in 2021 by Sadra Hosseini, Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby, Ryft handles the payment plumbing that marketplaces, platforms and multi-location businesses otherwise have to assemble themselves: seller onboarding, automated split payments, recurring billing and cross-border payouts. It is FCA-regulated and sells against the embedded-payments offers of Stripe and Adyen – the pitch that made its £5.7M Series A, led by EdenBase in April 2025, a “challenge Stripe” story in Tech.eu’s telling.

The traction since then is the reason a growth investor showed up barely a year and a half later. More than 6,500 businesses run on the platform, from Epos Now and Chaiiwala to the Disasters Emergency Committee, Daytrip and Sprive, and the company says processing volume tripled over the past twelve months. Gresham House partner Rohit Mathur points at customers “compounding volumes over 100% annually” – the kind of line growth equity firms write cheques for.

Embedded finance: $156bn now, on its way to $454bn

The segment Ryft sells into is anything but settled. Embedded finance is worth USD 155.96bn in 2026 and is forecast to reach USD 454.48bn by 2031, a 23.84% CAGR, per Mordor Intelligence (2026), with payments the largest slice of it at 43.68% of the market in 2025 (same source). A market compounding at nearly 24% a year is not one the incumbents have finished carving up; it is one still being built.

The same week puts the stage ladder on display in our own fundraising data: Creem, the Tallinn payments startup building billing for AI companies, raised a €5M seed led by Inovo VC on 17 September – the entry end of the same wave Ryft is now riding at Series B. Seed money is betting the category keeps splintering; Ryft’s round is the evidence that the survivors of the last splinter can reach scale.

What a Manchester record says about UK fintech

So what does it signal when the year’s biggest UK payments Series B is signed in Manchester? First, that UK fintech is no longer a London monopoly – the North West has produced an FCA-regulated payments company that names its own record. Second, look at who paid for it: a growth equity house and a VCT, patient British vehicles, in a spot where a US crossover fund would have led three years ago. We are watching domestic capital fund the scale-up stage it used to leave to others – the same week Felicis and Sequoia led Magentic’s $18M Series A in London, and a General Catalyst seed went to Copenhagen’s Complir.

The good news is that this is exactly the layer Europe has been told it cannot fund for itself. A £20M Series B from Gresham House, Pembroke and Ingenii is not a US mega-round, and it does not need to be: it is proportionate, domestic and aimed squarely at taking a UK product into the EEA through a Maltese licence. Watch whether the MFSA approval lands and how fast the European seller base grows – that is where this round will be judged. The pattern is worth backing. Let’s see Manchester set the record again next year!