Sadra Hosseini

Sadra Hosseini co-founded Ryft in Manchester in 2021 with Alex Mackenzie and Richard Kirby, and is its chief executive. Ryft is a payments provider regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that builds for marketplaces, platforms and businesses with many locations. It handles card acceptance, recurring billing, automated split payments, seller onboarding and escrow: the parts of a transaction that get complicated when money flows between more than one buyer and one seller.

Tripling volume

Ryft says its transaction processing volume tripled over the past year and that more than 6,500 businesses now use its platform, including Epos Now, the Disasters Emergency Committee, Daytrip and Sprive. It works with Global Payments, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Nuvei.

On 17 September 2026 it announced a £20m Series B led by Gresham House Ventures, with existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital, which it described as the largest UK payments Series B of 2026. The money will fund expansion into Europe and the US, a push into larger enterprise clients and faster product development.

Taking a Manchester build to Europe

As part of the European plan, Ryft has applied to the Malta Financial Services Authority for a full EU license, which would let it passport its services across the European Economic Area.

“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,” Hosseini said. “Payments have been dominated by a small number of incumbents for a long time. We want to provide a powerful and efficient alternative to businesses, not just in Europe, but globally.”

The round drew a response from government. Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby said Ryft’s success was “a vote of confidence in Manchester’s thriving fintech sector”.

Why it matters to UK buyers

For UK software platforms, marketplaces and franchise businesses, embedded payments are both a product feature and a source of revenue, and splitting funds between sellers, sites and the platform is slow, heavily regulated work. Ryft sells that capability as infrastructure, so a platform can offer payments without building a payments business. For software vendors that already resell payments to their own customers, as point-of-sale providers often do, it is a UK-built alternative to the large processors with a regulated split-payment layer included.

Hosseini has built a regulated payments business outside London and grown it to thousands of merchants in five years. The Series B gives Ryft the capital and, if the Maltese license comes through, the permissions to test that model across Europe.