Payments Platform Reserve Trust Raises $30.5m Series A from QED Investors and FinTech Collective
Very few companies have the potential to build foundational payments infrastructure, with the opportunity to rewire trillions of dollars of payments flow every year.
Leadership from proven serial entrepreneurs, with a business seeing rapid revenue growth, gets us even more excited.
Today we’re pleased to announce that FTC has added Reserve Trust to the portfolio, as a core position in our second fund.
FTC Summary
The B2B payments industry is massive, with $25 trillion of payments volume annually in the U.S. and $140 trillion globally. These payments largely operate over the bank payment rails, which in the U.S. is managed by the Federal Reserve and includes ACH, wire, and eventually FedNow’s real-time payments scheme.
These payments can be stunningly expensive, slow, manual, and “data poor.” Improving the B2B payments experience with technology has proven very difficult, as a partner bank must facilitate every transaction on the back-end. The banks introduce significant friction and cost due to their capital requirements, regulatory overhead, and decades of technical debt.
Reserve Trust has the opportunity to disintermediate bank gatekeepers and unlock the next wave of innovation in B2B payments. Armed with a master account at the Federal Reserve (and direct access to the rails), Reserve Trust is building the foundation for bank payments that are faster, cheaper, and smarter. The opportunity is global, with international financial institutions already turning to Reserve Trust to facilitate stateside payments and custody.
Over time, Reserve Trust can become a modern, high-tech payments processor across a broad set of customers and use cases. Current and potential customers include software companies looking to embed payments, money services businesses, payments processors seeking a new bank partner, and international financial institutions in search of U.S. correspondent banking.
Most importantly, Reserve Trust is led by a unique team with deep experience in building cloud infrastructure at scale. Dave Wright (CEO) and Dave Cahill (COO) previously built cloud storage pioneer SolidFire, which sold to NetApp for $870m. In addition to lead investor QED, we are joined in the financing by Ardent’s Phil Bronner, Solidfire’s original seed backer. Additional investors in the round include Flywire CEO, Mike Massaro, and Quovo Founder and CEO, Lowell Putnam.
Reserve Trust is on a mission to power the future of B2B payments. We are excited to be along for the journey. Let’s go!
Media Highlights
Reserve Trust's unique combination of a trust charter with a Federal Reserve master account allows us to create foundational payment and custody services delivered via APIs to enable innovation across the entire fintech ecosystem. The funding announced today, including leading investors across the fintech ecosystem, will go a long way to helping us continue to execute on this vision.
Reserve Trust CEO Dave Wright