Aurora Payments
Also a provider — view Aurora Payments’s profile →“Can a PE-backed payments infrastructure company become the embedded fintech OS for vertical SaaS platforms and Main Street SMBs by offering payments, capital, and ACH under one modular stack?”
Founded1996
HQTempe, AZ, USA
Latest roundBuyout/LBO
IndustryInfrastructure / Payments
The story
Originally founded in 1996 as Applied Merchant Systems West Coast, Aurora rebranded and evolved into a full-service payments infrastructure company serving vertical SaaS and SMB merchants. It expanded via acquisition (One Payment in 2022) and launched the ARISE platform in 2024 to offer embedded payments, zero-cost processing, invoicing, ACH, and working capital to ISVs and SMBs. The company has positioned itself as an embedded fintech infrastructure layer for platforms that want to monetize payments without building in-house.
Product timeline
1996
Founded as Applied Merchant Systems West Coast, providing payment processing technology for hospitality, healthcare, retail, and other verticals.· payments
2022
Acquired One Payment, a Florida-based paytech with 6,000+ merchants and $1B+ annual payments volume, expanding Aurora's East Coast footprint.· acquisition
2024
Launched the ARISE Payment Platform, a cloud-based, payment-agnostic all-in-one payments gateway for SMBs, supporting card-present and card-not-present environments.· payments
The stack
3 layers disclosed in Aurora Payments’s embedded-finance stack
Payments / PSP
Aurora Payments ARISE (self-operated)
Money movement
in the full report
Lending
in the full report
Accounting gap: significant
2 more providers across 2 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.