A Greater Cincinnati startup financial technology payments company has raised $1.5 million from investors.
The fundraising marks the first investment round of outside money for Blue Ash-based digital payments company Payload, co-founder and CEO Ryan Rybolt told me.
Investors in the $1.5 million round wrapped up in early April mainly consisted of family and friends, along with a couple of “strategic private investors,” Rybolt said. The vast majority of the investors are local.
Payload plans to use the newly raised capital to expand the company and add people, Rybolt told me.
“We’ve been extremely surgical about how we’ve deployed our resources to date, and we’ve been able to grow the company to profitability with the small amount of cash we’ve had on hand,” Rybolt said. “The time is right to invest in scaling the team to address the heavy market demands. We believe this funding will provide us that runway for growth.”
Payload is looking to add people in software engineering and business development. It plans to add two people in the real estate industry as well as engineers. Rybolt expects the company’s employee base to double to 12 within six months.
The company provides digital payment capabilities for real estate transactions. Rybolt and Ian Halpern founded the company in 2019 and launched a product to enable digital payments when people pay earnest money in a real estate transaction. They later added capabilities and branded the main product as Keybox to handle digital payments in all aspects of real estate deals, including paying commissions to brokers and closing payments.
Payload is on a breakneck growth pace. Revenue skyrocketed more than 800% in 2021. In the first quarter this year, revenue soared 177% from the same period a year ago. It will likely reach the milestone this year of handling $1 billion in payments during its brief history. Its payments processed should more than double from $300 million last year.
The company also plans to expand its digital payment capabilities to other industries beyond real estate.
“We’re already in discussions with a few high-potential industries,” Rybolt said.
It’s targeting four new industry verticals now and could add several at the same time.
“All lack from the same issues, either extremely archaic payment workflows when they’re receiving money or making payments,” Rybolt said. “They all have the same characteristics.”
Some of those industries, which he declined to name at this point, came to Payload seeking digital payment help.
Rybolt said the market will determine when Payload goes out to raise additional money to finance growth.
“We don’t want to raise money that we don’t foresee spending,” Rybolt said. “And we want to make sure when we do raise, we raise for deliberate reasons, meaning pointed market expansion.”
Rybolt helped launch locally based payment processor Infintech in 2004 and was president for more than a decade. It merged with Nashville, Tenn.-based I3 Verticals in August 2015.
