Rainforest is making a strong case that it is Atlanta’s fintech startup to watch.
Since getting an infusion of seed capital last October, the team has grown its payment volume by 17x. It found a sweet spot serving mid-market customers, which other major players in the embedded payments world like Stripe left behind.
Now, it is one of only a handful of fintechs in the city to raise a Series A funding round over the last two years.
About the Funding Round
Rainforest announced its $20 million Series A funding round today. The round was led by Matrix Partners. Previous investors Accel, Infinity Ventures, BoxGroup, The Fintech Fund, Atlanta-based Tech Square Ventures, and Ardent Venture Partners also joined the round.
Matrix is no stranger to the Atlanta tech ecosystem. The San Francisco-based venture capital firm has been an investor in Flock Safety since the security technology company raised its Series A back in 2018. Outside of Atlanta, Matrix is an investor in tech giants like Afterpay, Canva, Flex, Hubspot, Quora, and Zendesk.
BoxGroup is an investor in fintechs Plaid and Stripe. It also has Southeast-based companies Stord and Palmetto in its portfolio.
Founder and CEO Joshua Silver said that he has been talking to the Matrix team for the last year following a cold outreach email from the VC’s partner Matt Brown.
“While I get lots of prospective investor emails, Matt wrote an extremely compelling story which indicated he really understood our space,” Silver told Hypepotamus. “I was looking for investors who have really a good track record, have seen cycles up and down, and understand what it actually takes to build an industry-leading company. We’re really focused on building the foundations of our company correctly. Building the technology and processes that will allow us to support very large customers for many, many years to come. A lot of startups just try to grow as absolutely fast as possible. They cut lots of corners and really sacrifice the quality. We refuse to sacrifice quality. Payments need to be 100% correct, 100% of the time. Having investors that understand this is important.”
Behind Rainforest’s Growth
Hypepotamus last caught up with Rainforest following their $11.75 million seed round announcement, which was only eight months ago. Since then, Silver said that the team has hired more engineering, support, sales, and payment operations roles.
Silver has taken a true team approach to finding talent, telling Hypepotamus that they start the hiring process by talking to current employees.
“When we’re recruiting for a role, we ask everyone to sit down for a few minutes together to brainstorm on everyone in their network we should be talking to. Let’s say you have 5 people who each have 5 connections … that’s 25 warm leads to go talk to,” he said. “I know we have an exceptional team because clients, prospects, and partners proactively and unprompted tell me how incredible the team is, and they often highlight an individual or two. One of my priorities as a founder / CEO is to hire the best people, so the quality of our team continues to be a differentiator.”
