Fintech
Fast-growing Atlanta fintech lands new Bay Area investor for $20 million. A league
Rain forest is making a strong case that it’s the Atlanta fintech startup to watch.
Since receiving an initial capital injection last October, the team has grown payments volume 17x. It has found a sweet spot in serving mid-market customers that other major integrated payments players like Stripe have left behind.
It is now one of the few fintechs in the city to have raised Series A funding in the last two years.
Information on the financing 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, based in Atlanta Tech Square Venturesand Ardent Venture Partners also joined the round.
Matrix is no stranger to Atlanta’s tech ecosystem. The San Francisco-based venture capital firm participated in an investment Safety of the flock since the security technology company raised its Series A in 2018. Outside of Atlanta, Matrix is an investor in tech giants like Afterpay, Canva, Flex, Hubspot, Quora, and Zendesk.
BoxGroup is a fintech investor Plaids and stripes. Its portfolio also includes the Southeast-based Stord and Palmetto companies.
Founder and CEO Joshua Silver said he had been speaking to the Matrix team over the past year following a cold outreach email from the VC partner Matte brown.
“Even though I get a lot of emails from potential investors, Matt wrote an extremely compelling story that indicated he really understood our space,” Silver told Hypepotamus. “I was looking for investors who had a really good track record, who had seen cycles of ups and downs, and who understood what it actually takes to build an industry-leading company. We’re really focused on building the foundation of our company right. Building the technology and processes that will allow us to support very large customers for many, many years to come. Many startups simply try to grow as fast as possible. They cut a lot of corners and really sacrifice quality. We refuse to sacrifice quality. Payments must be 100% correct, 100% of the time. Having investors who understand this is important.”
Behind the growth of the rainforest
Hypepotamus reached Rainforest for the last time after their $11.75 million seed round announced, which happened just eight months ago. Since then, Silver said the team has taken on 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 together for a few minutes to brainstorm everyone in their network we should talk to. Let’s say you have 5 people who each have 5 connections… that’s 25 warm contacts to talk to,” he said. “I know we have a great team because customers, prospects and partners proactively and spontaneously tell me how much it is The team is incredible and they often highlight one or two individuals. One of my priorities as founder/CEO is to hire the best people, so that the quality of our team continues to make a difference.”
Featured Photo From left to right: Jeremy Jonker (Infinity Ventures), Joshua Silver (Rainforest), Matt Brown (Matrix Partners), Dana Stalder (Matrix Partners) (Photo: Chloe Jackman)