News from the Wire
Rainforest raises $29M to scale embedded payments for vertical SaaS platforms
Monday, September 08, 2025 — 15:39:45 (UTC)
ATLANTA, GA – September 8, 2025: Rainforest, an embedded payment provider purpose-built for software platforms, today announced it has raised an oversubscribed $29 million Series B funding round led by Matrix Partners and Infinity Ventures with participation from Accel and Tech Square Ventures. All investors participated in Rainforest’s Series A last year. The new capital brings the company’s total funding to date to $57.5 million and will fuel hiring, geographic expansion to Canada, and product development including tap-to-phone, alternate payment methods and fintech orchestration.
Since Rainforest’s last funding round, the company grew revenue by more than 10x fueled by billions of dollars in annual processing volume. From healthcare and non-profit donation management to professional services and youth sports, growth has been strong across industries, with Hint Health, Payground, RoadSync, QuoteMachine, d-tools, ProLine, Duesy, and Materio representing just a few of the nearly hundred software platforms that rely on Rainforest for their payments. The company has also advanced its product in ways that help software platforms grow payments adoption, volume, and revenue:
● Embeddable chargeback management that guides merchants through the chargeback response ● Advanced ACH payments with real-time bank validation and balance check to reduce failed payments and enable faster payouts to merchants on qualified platforms ● Real-time BIN lookup to support compliant surcharging ● Partial authorizations to increase auth rates, especially in HSA/FSA payments ● Forward API enabling platforms to securely share data with trusted third parties – without requesting a token export
“Doubling down on our commitment to Rainforest was a no-brainer. They delivered even more growth than expected in the year following their Series A. Joshua Silver is a remarkable founder-leader who, along with his team, has been laser-focused on delivering superior service and modern embedded payments from day one,” said Matt Brown, Partner at Matrix and Rainforest Board member. “Embedded payments are the secret weapon of the best vertical software companies, like Shopify and Toast. It’s not uncommon to see 2-5x increases in revenue, retention, and other metrics once a platform successfully embeds payments. It’s easier than ever to add payments to a vertical SaaS product, but it’s harder than ever to succeed with payments because revenue depends on adoption. Rainforest provides the technology, service, and proven playbook to help their platform clients maximize adoption and drive real payments revenue.”
Accelerated growth and industry tailwinds as SMBs abandon traditional payment processors
According to UBS, SMBs account for 25-30% of U.S. payment volume but at least 70% of net revenues. The portion of SMB merchant acquiring revenue processed through SaaS platforms is expected to increase from 33% of total merchant acquiring revenue in 2024 to 46% by 2029, as SMBs move away from traditional processors. Meanwhile, Bain & Company projects embedded payments will exceed $7 trillion of total U.S. financial transactions by 2026. This represents a growing opportunity for SaaS platforms to capture SMB payment processing revenue.
Rainforest allows vertical software companies to seamlessly embed payments in their platforms to drive revenue, retention and enterprise value. Demand for Rainforest has surged year over year as vertical software companies seek a trusted payment provider addressing the biggest headaches in embedded payments:
● Legitimate merchants get rejected while fraudsters slip through, leaving the software company liable for the loss ● Lack of visibility to where merchant is in the onboarding process or what is needed ● Payment data that is inconsistent, out of date, or not programmatically compliant ● Routine operational tasks that escalate to the payment provider ● Discrepancies in merchant deposits, appearing late or short, without explanation ● Long delays – up to days – for payment provider responses, while the payment provider holds a merchant deposit hostage ● Limited access to essential data required to calculate true payment processing costs and profitability
Rainforest equips customers with a single modern technology stack and expert service that addresses every payment-related need, while promoting growth, enhancing retention and managing risk. Its core product and service were built specifically for software platforms. Rainforest’s focus on embedded payments for vertical software platforms stands apart from competitors like Stripe Connect and Ayden Platforms, which were initially built for merchants and then retrofitted for software platforms.
“Our growth reflects our customers’ success – many of them rely on Rainforest to generate 50% or more of their revenue, which is both an extreme honor and responsibility. In my twenty years of experience in payment technology, I have never felt more confident about the ability to deliver on the wishlist of functionality, security, visibility, consistency and reliability,” said Joshua Silver, founder and CEO of Rainforest. “We’re seeing an increase in demand because vertical software companies want an embedded payments product that’s purpose-built for their use case and a provider who is focused on their needs. We’ve already signed major Stripe clients with billions in processing volume. This new investment will be instrumental in building on our momentum and making our platform even more feature-rich as we help our customers maximize their payment revenue.”
With Rainforest’s purpose-built technology, world-class service, and proven playbook, software platforms get real results, including:
● Margin increased from 21 to 54 basis points ● 1600+ merchants migrated in just a few weeks ● 16% increase in card volume with UI optimizations ● HSA/FSA auth rate increased from <30% to 94% ● 90% reduction in chargebacks due to fraud
“One of the biggest challenges vertical SaaS companies face is the ability to migrate payment volume to a new provider and some companies struggle for years,” said Jeremy Jonker, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Infinity Ventures. “This is exactly where Rainforest shines, helping their platform clients move hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few weeks or months. Rainforest has a repeatable playbook that they’ve demonstrated in healthcare, non-profit, and other verticals. We didn’t hesitate to lead the investment and support their next phase of growth because they’ve consistently demonstrated their ability to deliver a high quality solution and service at scale.”
“Rainforest is so much more than a technology company, they’re an extension of our team,” said Zak Holdsworth, CEO of Hint Health. “From high-level migration strategy to specific messaging, technical details, and day-to-day support, the Rainforest team works closely with us to make sure we get the desired outcome – a profitable, high-quality embedded payments product where we own our data and customer relationships – while making the transition as seamless as possible for our customers. Rainforest is a true partner.”
Team expansion
Since the Series A raise, Rainforest has strategically expanded the team to fuel the next stage of growth. Rainforest has welcomed key leadership team members overseeing GTM, People, and Legal. As a product-driven company, Rainforest has doubled the size of the engineering team to accelerate innovation and, equally important, has more than doubled the platform experience team—adding new team leaders in Payment Operations and Risk because customer service is a core value at the company. Rainforest has built a world-class hybrid team and been recognized as a Built In 2025 Best Places to Work. With this momentum, the recent Series B will allow Rainforest to continue growing the team for the benefit of current and future platforms.
About Rainforest
Rainforest is a payment provider that helps software platforms build and optimize embedded financial services. With Rainforest, software platforms can provide a best-in-class payments experience for their end merchants without the risk, compliance, economic and operational burdens of registering as a payment facilitator with card networks. Rainforest provides low-code integration technology, true merchant portability, transparent pricing, the industry's most flexible contract terms and a no-risk model. Rainforest has been awarded Venture Atlanta’s 2023 Emerging Startup of the Year, The Information’s Top 50 Most Promising Startups for 2024, and Global Financial Market Review’s Best Payment Technology Innovation USA 2025. Learn more at www.rainforestpay.com/.
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Source: Company press release. 
Categories: Announcement
