Forage, a payments processor that helps retailers and food-delivery companies accept EBT cards, raised a $40M Series B led by Mouro Capital at a $225M valuation
Forage secures venture funding as it expands food-stamp payment processing despite declining federal enrollment
Context & Ripple Effects
Forage previously raised a $22M Series A at roughly a $100M valuation to help grocers accept online SNAP payments. The new round extends that same payments-infrastructure focus to retailers and food-delivery companies, rather than representing a change in business model.
Related coverage also shows consumer-facing SNAP tooling in Propel’s Fresh EBT app; Forage operates on the merchant-payment side of that ecosystem. The funding arrives even as the article notes declining federal enrollment, making merchant adoption and processing reach central to its expansion case.
First-order effects
- Forage gains $40M to expand its EBT-processing platform and support more retailer and food-delivery integrations.
- Retailers and delivery companies that need to accept EBT have a better-capitalized specialist provider, while Mouro Capital becomes a lead investor in the company’s next growth phase.
Second-order effects
- The financing raises pressure on other payment and commerce-infrastructure providers serving SNAP-eligible transactions to deepen their merchant integrations and service coverage.
- As more merchants add EBT acceptance, consumer-facing tools such as SNAP balance and store-discovery apps have a larger pool of participating merchants to surface, though declining enrollment may constrain transaction growth.
Third-order effects
- If funding continues to flow to EBT-payment infrastructure despite enrollment pressure, the category may evolve from a narrow online-grocery feature into a more broadly embedded checkout capability across retail and delivery.
- The key structural test is whether specialized processors can build durable merchant networks before program participation and policy conditions limit the addressable transaction base.
The trend: This is part of the gradual digitization of benefit-payment acceptance, with specialized infrastructure companies trying to make EBT usable across mainstream online retail and delivery checkout flows.