Ryft Raises £1.2M Seed to Build the Payments Infrastructure for Marketplace Commerce
January 15, 2025
Ryft, a London-based payments infrastructure company, has raised £1.2 million in a seed funding round led by SFC Capital, with additional investment from the former founder of Shutterstock and the founder of LoveFilm. The company is building a payment platform specifically designed to serve the complex needs of online marketplaces and multi-sided platforms, enabling them to accept, split, hold, and route payments between multiple parties in a compliant and cost-effective way.
Ryft was founded by Sadra Hosseini and Alex Mackenzie, two serial entrepreneurs who had previously built Butlr, a restaurant ordering and management platform that was acquired by OrderPay in 2021. While scaling Butlr, the founders ran into a wall that every marketplace operator eventually encounters: existing payment infrastructure was built for simple, one-to-one transactions. A marketplace transaction — where a buyer pays a platform, which takes a commission and routes the remainder to a seller, while perhaps also holding funds in escrow against a dispute or service level — requires a fundamentally different set of capabilities. Stripe Connect offered one route, but with high fees and limited flexibility. Building a custom solution in-house was technically complex and required specialist compliance infrastructure. Neither option was satisfactory for a fast-moving startup.
Ryft was built to be the solution they had wished existed. The platform provides the full stack of capabilities needed to support marketplace payment flows: accepting payments from all major cards and digital wallets, splitting transactions between multiple parties in any configuration, routing payouts to sub-merchants, handling delayed payments with an escrow capability, and automating compliance with KYC, AML, PSD2, and PCI DSS. All of this is accessible through a clean RESTful API and SDKs for web, iOS, and Android, designed to minimise integration effort for engineering teams. Ryft charges a flat fee per transaction, rather than a percentage-based model, giving marketplaces cost predictability as their volumes scale.
The seed funding provided the capital needed to obtain Ryft's FCA authorisation — a gruelling process that the company completed within a year and a half of launch, a rare achievement for a team of fourteen — and to establish partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. The company describes its ambition as transforming Commerce 2.0: a world where transactions within a single marketplace involve numerous parties and specific conditions, and where the financial infrastructure needs to be as flexible and programmable as the commercial model it supports. Over 1,500 businesses adopted Ryft's platform, and the company reached profitability two and a half years after launch, going on to raise a £5.7 million Series A in 2025.
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