Payr Raises £1.5M to Let Tenants Pay Rent by Credit Card While Landlords Receive It as Normal

March 2, 2026

Payr, the London-based fintech startup, raised £1.5 million in a seed round in March 2026, led by Ingenii Capital, with participation from Haatch, Velocity Capital, the British Business Bank, and strategic angel investors. The funding will expand platform integrations, deepen product infrastructure, and accelerate distribution partnerships across the residential rental sector. Payr was co-founded by Arthur Greenwood, Victor Della Faille, Mohy Jishi, and Sami Hassan.

Rent is the single largest recurring payment in the budgets of most UK renters. The average monthly rent in London exceeded £2,600 in early 2026; nationally, it surpassed £1,300. For many tenants, rent is not only their biggest expense but also the payment most likely to be timed awkwardly relative to their salary cycle, most likely to create short-term cash flow stress, and most likely to affect their financial wellbeing when things go wrong. Yet despite this significance, rent remains structurally locked to the most basic payment infrastructure: a direct bank transfer, initiated manually, processed through legacy banking rails, with none of the flexibility, rewards, or buyer protections that consumers now take for granted across every other major spending category. A commuter can accumulate air miles and cashback on a £150 rail season ticket. A shopper can earn rewards on a weekly grocery shop. A business can pay its corporation tax by card. But a renter paying £1,500 a month receives nothing in return and has no flexibility to smooth the payment across a credit cycle.

Payr has built what it describes as one-sided payments infrastructure: a system that decouples the payment experience for the tenant from the settlement experience for the landlord. A tenant registers their existing credit card with Payr and pays their rent through the platform as they normally would. Payr processes the card transaction, handles the associated fee structure, and simultaneously initiates a standard bank transfer to the landlord for the full rent amount. The landlord receives their money as they always have — via the bank account they already use, in the full amount, with no change to their workflow, no new system to integrate, and no additional compliance burden. This one-sided architecture is the key commercial insight: previous attempts to bring card payments to rent failed because they required landlords and letting agents to adopt new infrastructure. Payr removes that requirement entirely, meaning the tenant’s product improvement does not depend on landlord behaviour change.

Ingenii Capital Managing Partner Michael Boocher described Payr as having identified a clear market inefficiency and built a solution that meets the evolving financial habits of modern renters, with early traction and a distribution strategy that made the investment straightforward. The British Business Bank’s participation reflects the platform’s positioning at the intersection of financial inclusion and housing affordability — giving renters access to credit flexibility and reward accumulation that homeowners and higher-income consumers have long enjoyed as a matter of course. Haatch and Velocity Capital, both active in consumer fintech, add distribution network value alongside their capital. The use of funds is focused on distribution: building integrations with letting agency platforms and property management systems that allow Payr to reach renters at the point of tenancy agreement rather than requiring individual consumer acquisition.

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