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At Mouro Capital, we’ve always believed that the most durable fintech companies aren’t built on novelty but often built on necessity. They solve problems that are structurally embedded, operationally painful, and in many cases chronically underserved by incumbents. That belief is at the heart of our decision to lead Forage’s $40 million Series B.
Forage is the payments infrastructure platform for the restricted-spend economy, starting with SNAP EBT and expanding into HSA/FSA and other regulated payment types. In simple terms, they make it possible for retailers and platforms to accept government benefits reliably, online and in-store, through a single modern integration.
A Problem Hidden in Plain Sight
Roughly 40 million Americans rely on SNAP benefits, with nearly $100 billion in annual spend that flows through some of the most outdated payments infrastructure in the country. The legacy system was designed for brick-and-mortar checkouts decades ago, and it shows. Integration timelines with legacy processors can stretch to 9+ months. Uptime among these incumbents hovers around 96%. Vague error codes leave shoppers stranded at checkout with no explanation. And the compliance burden of becoming an authorized online SNAP retailer has traditionally been so overwhelming that many merchants simply don’t bother.
This is not a niche infrastructure problem. It’s a structural failure with real human consequences: carts abandoned, benefits going unredeemed, and millions of families unable to use their entitlements where they actually shop, which all lead to many of them going hungry.
Conviction Backed by Deep Domain Knowledge
When we met Ofek Lavian, Forage’s co-founder and CEO, the first thing that struck us was how intimately he understood this problem. He didn’t come to it theoretically. Before founding Forage, Ofek led payments at Instacart, where he launched EBT SNAP and scaled it to over $1 billion in volume in the first 12 months. He’s seen these rails from the inside and he built Forage specifically to fix them.
That kind of founder-market fit is essential to us. We look for teams who’ve been close enough to the problem to feel it, not just imagine it. The broader leadership bench — spanning Stripe, Affirm, Plaid, and deep regulatory experience in government affairs — doesn’t just understand payments. They understand the intersection of payments, compliance, and policy that defines this space.
Modern Infrastructure for a Legacy Problem
What Forage has built is not a marginal improvement on what came before; it’s a rethinking of what this infrastructure should look like. Onboarding that used to take 9+ months now takes 12 weeks. Reliability and error recovery that legacy processors left to merchants to figure out are core product features. Compliance complexity that once required armies of consultants is handled through AI-assisted tooling with human review.
The result is a platform that sells measurable incremental revenue to merchants, not just lower-cost processing — a distinction that matters enormously in a market incumbents have historically treated as a commodity.
A GTM Machine That Compounds
Forage’s go-to-market pairs partner-led distribution, through POS systems and payment platforms with long-term exclusivity agreements, with a land-and-expand enterprise playbook. Land a major customer in one channel, prove out reliability and measurable lift, then expand across every channel they operate. The same trust built in one integration becomes the unlock for a full channel matrix.
The results speak for themselves. Forage is now integrated across more than 100,000 stores in all 50 states, with partners including DoorDash, Uber Eats, Dollar General, and GoPuff, and the pipeline continues to grow.
The Flywheel Just Started Spinning
The B2B payments business alone would be a compelling investment. But what truly excites us is where Forage is going next.
They have launched a consumer app, already downloaded over 100,000 times, that helps low-income families check EBT balances in real time, discover savings, earn rewards on everyday purchases, and understand what they can and can’t buy with EBT.
This creates a flywheel. EBT acceptance unlocks merchant distribution. Merchant reach drives consumer app adoption. Consumer demand and data pull CPG brands in, funding savings and promotions that flow back to families. Each turn of the wheel deepens the network. What began as payments infrastructure compounds into a platform serving the affordability economy, a segment that represents over $100 billion in annual SNAP spend and has never had payments infrastructure built specifically for it.
We believe this flywheel, combined with expansion into HSA/FSA and other regulated benefit rails, will make Forage the de facto payments platform for the restricted-spend economy. The company that started by solving one of the most painful compliance problems in payments is building toward a genuinely category-defining business.
Why Now, Why Mouro
Payments infrastructure is core to what we do. From iZettle to Ripple, TrueLayer, and Burbank, we’ve backed companies modernizing how money moves, and we know how to spot them. When we met Forage, the pattern was familiar: a compliance-heavy market underserved by legacy players, a founder who had lived the problem, and a GTM motion built to compound.
The cost of groceries is the number-one financial stressor in America. Forage is building the network that makes it easy for low-income families to spend their benefits, and for the retailers who serve them to do it right. That is the kind of fintech we back — infrastructure-deep, mission-aligned, and built to matter.
We’re proud to partner with Ofek, Victor, and the entire Forage team for what comes next.
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