Author: Daniel Stewart
Date: April 14th, 2025
When I was building HobbySolver, one of the biggest frictions wasn’t growth or user onboarding—it was payments. Specifically, how do you handle split payments between mentors and the platform? How do you onboard sellers compliantly, manage payouts, and stay out of regulatory trouble?
Enter Ryft, the UK-based startup becoming the payments infrastructure behind a new wave of vertical platforms and marketplaces. They’re not trying to be a flashy B2C brand. Instead, Ryft is going deep into infra-as-distribution—the kind of play that makes them sticky, scalable, and potentially undervalued.
The Infra Layer Most Startups Don’t Realize They Need
At its core, Ryft is solving for the operational and compliance complexity that comes with marketplace and platform-based business models. That includes:
- Split payments
- Real-time KYC/AML onboarding
- Regulatory reporting
- Merchant payouts
- Escrow and fee collection
I think most founders underestimate how painful this layer is—until they get to the building stage.
Why This Is Infra-as-Distribution
Infra-as-distribution means your product sits invisibly inside other businesses—but it’s the critical pipe everything flows through. Like AWS, Twilio, or Stripe in their early days, Ryft becomes:
- Hard to rip out once integrated
- Able to grow with their customers (as their GMV scales, Ryft’s revenue does too)
- Positioned to expand horizontally (subscriptions, lending, etc.)
Who’s Already Using Them?
Ryft’s infrastructure is being adopted by wellness platforms, talent marketplaces, on-demand apps, and booking systems—sectors where compliance and split logic make Stripe overkill.
These are the same sectors that gave rise to billion-dollar platforms like Mindbody, Uber, and TaskRabbit—all of which eventually had to build custom payout systems. Ryft is betting that the next generation of those platforms won’t want to.
Who Might Acquire Ryft?
I think Ryft is in a perfect strategic position for several types of acquirers:
- Stripe: Simplify its downmarket onboarding strategy for verticalized platforms.
- Adyen: Move into SME and no-code platform segments.
- Rapyd or Payoneer: Expand global payout and compliance capabilities.
- Shopify or Wix: Equip their ecosystem to handle marketplace payouts.
Final Thoughts
Ryft is the kind of startup that investors overlook until it’s too late. It’s infra. It’s low-profile. It’s deep in the stack. But that’s exactly why it’s so powerful. As more niche platforms emerge, Ryft could become their default payments layer—abstracting the hard stuff and scaling silently alongside them. If I were an investor, I’d be paying close attention. Infrastructure like this doesn’t stay hidden for long.
Why It Matters: The next wave of platforms won’t build payouts from scratch. Ryft is betting they’ll plug into them instead—and quietly ride every dollar flowing through the creator and service economy.