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CEO Chat: Rainforest

Written by Joshua Silver, Founder & CEO | 8/26/24 5:18 PM

Company: RAINFOREST (private)

Headquarters: Atlanta, GA

Year Founded: 2022

 

1. What problem was RAINFOREST founded to solve?

My first startup, Patientco, was a healthcare patient financial engagement company. After exiting to Waystar, I spent several years running a consulting firm focused on helping software companies embed payments and other financial services to their products. SaaS companies were all looking for the same basic thing – a payments provider who offered robust, modern technology with a great developer experience, exceptional customer service, and fair commercial terms with full portability of merchant data. But there was no payment provider who offered this, and software companies were forced to choose between great tech, expert support, and fair commercials. Until Rainforest..

 

2. How do you describe RAINFOREST'S right to win in your market?

While most competitors focus primarily on driving down costs, we focus on driving volume expansion and profitability for our software platform clients – which ultimately drives the revenue, retention, and enterprise value that these companies are looking for. Rainforest was purpose-built for software platforms, not wrapped around a legacy processor. The end result is a high-quality payment experience that’s easy for software companies to implement and easy for merchants to use. We built millions of dollars of consulting expertise right into the product, implementation process, and support model, so our platform clients have everything they need to create a winning payments product.

 

3. What are your key goals and definition of success in the next 12 months?

Our goal is to be the best embedded payments provider, period. On the product side, we’re focused on features that enable our platform partners to grow their payment volume without creating a lot of merchant support demands or manual work for the platform’s internal team. This includes increasing the self-serve functionality in our embeddable components, and automating interchange optimization. On the service side, we’re doubling down on the white-glove support we’re known for. We aim to over-deliver for our platform partners every day, and we know we’re successful when we see their processing volume grow month over month over month.