Activities related to credit intermediation

Well-funded on both sides: entrenched incumbents inside bank procurement and a dense field of venture-backed challengers already competing for the same AML and sanctions-screening budgets. Note the Canadian precedent — Verafin (Killick Capital-backed, and present in this repo's angel dataset) proves the market rewards a winner, and also that the winner has already emerged.

The thesis behind this category is true, and the proof is on EDGAR — which is exactly why it is a bad place for a new entrant. Toast's FY2025 10-K (year ended 2025-12-31) reports financial technology solutions revenue of $5,037M against subscription services revenue of $936M, on $195.1B of gross payment volume [A]. Payments is 5.4x the software line by revenue and still bigger by gross profit — $1,146M from fintech against $672M from subscriptions, computed from the 10-K's own cost-of-revenue table — even though the fintech margin is about 23% against 72% for software. AppFolio shows the same shape in property management: Value Added Services (electronic payments, tenant screening, risk mitigation) $721.5M against subscription services $211.5M in FY2025 [A]. The atlas's own vertical records reach the same answer from the other side: payments and insurance attach decides self-storage (Storable), marina (DockMaster Payments, Storable Marine), salon (Fresha at zero subscription), medspa (Boulevard, Zenoti) and field-service (Jobber, Housecall Pro) — all of them treat the licence as the cheap part. But the value flows to the software company that owns the merchant, not to the rail it rents. The infrastructure layer underneath is held by two giants. Stripe says businesses on it generated $1.9 trillion of volume in 2025, up 34%, and priced a tender offer at $159B (newsroom, 2026-02-24) [B]. Adyen reported FY2025 net revenue of EUR 2,364.2M on EUR 1,394.3B processed, with issuing volumes up 8x as platforms embedded cards (H2 2025 results, 2026-02-12) [A]. Below them the processors bought their way in: FIS bought Payrix in 2022, and Global Payments completed its purchase of Worldpay on 2026-01-12, serving more than 6 million merchant locations on $3.7 trillion of volume with an 'Integrated & Platforms' channel [A, 8-K]. The venture-funded challengers are small next to that and are selling the same thing: Finix (over $208M raised, Series C led by Acrew), Rainforest ($57.5M, Series B led by Matrix and Infinity Ventures, 2025-09-08), Tilled (nearly $40M), Infinicept ($23M growth round, 2022), Moov ($77.5M). Each one positions itself as cheaper or more vertical-friendly than Stripe — Rainforest's model is a consumption-based cut of each transaction with no platform fee [B] — which means the wedge is price, paid for out of a thin interchange margin. The adjacent layers (BaaS: Unit $169.6M, Treasury Prime ~$73M; embedded lending: Parafin $194M; embedded payroll: Check, $75M Series C led by Stripe) last raised in 2021-24 and none has announced a larger round since in the coverage opened here. An entrant needs a sponsor bank, card-network registration, underwriting and risk reserves before earning its first basis point, then has to win platforms that can renegotiate or switch processors once their volume is large. Entry cost and regulatory drag decide it. The money in this theme is earned by building the vertical software and attaching one of these rails — the right move for a Research Upon vertical, not a market to enter as the rail.