Rapyd Launches Venture Arm To Invest In Early-Stage Fintech Startups

Israeli-founded global fintech-as-a-service provider Rapyd announced on Thursday that it is launching a venture arm called Rapyd Ventures to invest in early and growth-stage businesses working on “the next wave of financial services innovation.”

Rapyd Ventures will work largely with startups following their seed round and through Series B funding that are looking to expand on existing market traction. In addition to capital, Rapyd Ventures will provide access to its extensive fintech-as-a-service capabilities and network of partners, offering startups strategic advice and giving them opportunities to move faster, expand more quickly, and accelerate their growth, the company said in a statement.

Rapyd Ventures will be led by Joel Yarbrough, Rapyd’s VP of Asia Pacific, and will look to back two types of endeavors: capability providers delivering core infrastructure in areas where the market is going, including identity and risk management, faster and more seamless money movement and embedded financial services; and end-user platforms that are directly providing innovative financial services to consumers and businesses.

The first investment from Rapyd Ventures is in Gotrade, a fractional shares trading platform founded in 2019 that enables users in over 150 countries to become investors. Gotrade removes the restrictive geographical barriers, commission fees and minimum deposit sizes to allow anyone to buy and sell fractional US shares.

“The innovations that we are seeing in the payments industry are not evenly distributed,” said Rapyd co-founder and CEO Arik Shtilman. We believe we have a mission and responsibility to support companies building both the infrastructure for next-generation financial services, as well as innovators building on top of these new capabilities around the world, and to accelerate their development.”

“Rapyd Ventures is proud to be investing in businesses like Gotrade that are expanding opportunities for people to become investors around the world, with great consumer experiences built on top of smart platform capabilities and operational excellence,” said Yarbrough. “We are engaging with entrepreneurs around the world to create the enabling infrastructure for next-generation financial services and bring to the market new fintech products that create opportunities for individuals, small, and large businesses to transact with lower friction, more quickly, safely, and in new ways.

“We believe that ‘FinTech’ will be built into all types of services, and we want to help bring to life a network of innovators and a rich set of new payment, identity, open banking, and embedded finance capabilities to make it happen,” he added.

Rapyd itself was founded in 2015 by Shtilman, Arkady Karpman, and Omer Priel. The company built a platform that embeds fintech services into any application and simplifies the complexity of offering local payment methods through an easy-to-use API. Businesses can accept and send payments without having to build their own infrastructure through the Rapyd Global Payments Network, which supports hundreds of local payment methods including cards, bank transfers, e-wallets, and cash.