Reserve Trust, an alternative to banks for companies wanting to access real-time payment rails, has secured a $30.5 million Series A investment, led by QED Investors with participation from FinTech Collective and Ardent Venture Partners
The round, including $17.9M in secondary shares, comes in addition to a prior $5 million seed round raised in October 2019.
Colorado-based Reserve Trust lays claim to being the first fintech trust company with a Federal Reserve master account. The trust structure allows customers to store funds in custody accounts that are backed by the Fed master account, and to transfer cash via ACH, FedWire, Swift, and other emerging payment systems.
In conjunction with the fundraise, Reserve Trust also named Dave Wright as CEO and hired Dave Cahill as chief operating officer. Wright and Cahill last partnered on the executive team at cloud storage company SolidFire, which Wright sold to NetApp in 2016.
"While banks will always have an important role to play in B2B commerce, they have struggled to deliver the technology and services that businesses need to fully digitize domestic and international payments," says Wright. "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."
He says the financing will be deployed to grow the team and develop new APIs and payment rail connections.