One of the largest startups building inside Atlanta Tech Village just landed $29 million in new funding.
Rainforest, which provides embedded payment options for software companies and works as a challenger to FinTech giant Stripe, is fresh off announcing its $29 million Series B funding from a mix of West Coast and Southeast investors.
All investors in the new capital round participated in Rainforest’s $20 million Series A in the summer of 2024.
Lead investors were Matrix Partners and Infinity Ventures, with participation from Accel and Atlanta-based Tech Square Ventures.
The new capital brings the company’s total funding to date to $57.5 million.
Founder and CEO Joshua Silver (center of featured photo) told Hypepotamus that their Series A fundraising journey last year “exceeded” the startup’s goals. “This inspired conversations around what levers we could pull to grow even faster and sustain that growth rate for longer. The answer is accelerating our product roadmap and scaling our GTM and customer-facing team. This funding empowers us to expand our team and build faster, without shortening our runway.”
Matt Brown, Partner at Matrix, said that investing in Rainforest’s Series B was a “no brainer.”
“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,” Brown added in a press statement. “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.”
What’s Fueling Rainforest’s Growth
Rainforest recorded a 10x growth in revenue year-over-year, with the company seeing a dramatic increase in its annual processing volume. The FinTech platform has attracted customers from a variety of different industries, ranging from healthcare companies to professional services to youth sports clubs.
When asked about what drove revenue growth, Silver told Hypepotamus that “the biggest surprise was actually platform size, rather than a specific industry. When I founded Rainforest, I assumed there was an upper limit on the size of platforms that would want our solution. If you look back at our Series A press release, it mentioned we’d achieved a stronghold among platforms processing $50 million – $2 billion annually. Since then, we’re finding platforms processing several billions annually that want our solution because even these larger platforms really aren’t getting the service they need and deserve from other payment providers.”
Recent updates to the product allows users to grow payments adoption, volume, and revenue through its embedded chargeback management solution, real-time bank validation, real-time BIN lookup, and partial authorization (important for those processing HSA/FSA payments).
Following the funding news, Rainforest is looking to grow its product offerings with tap-to-phone and alternate payment method options.
The funding will also be used to boost hiring efforts and expand its reach into the Canadian market.
“Expanding to Canada won’t just unlock a new market for Rainforest, it also allows our existing platform clients to expand their current offering into a new market,” Silver added.
Finding Talent
Rainforest’s logo is on the Atlanta Tech Village Buckhead’s marquee signage, a sign (quite literally) of its headcount growth.
Silver, who previously founded Patientco (exited to Waystar in 2021), said Rainforest has doubled the size of its engineering team since raising its Series A in 2024.
When asked about what he looks for in engineering talent, he said domain expertise, problem solving abilities, a bias towards action, and passion for helping clients win.
“We don’t do month-long code freezes. We average 6.5 releases per day, and we have robust testing procedures so engineers can move fast without breaking things,” he added.