Forage.

The money existed. Roughly 42 million Americans receive SNAP benefits - what an older generation still calls food stamps, now loaded onto an EBT card. The demand existed too; groceries are groceries, and people who get benefits would very much like to order them the same way everyone else does. What did not exist was the plumbing. Accepting EBT online means clearing a specific approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, integrating with legacy benefit processors, and satisfying a stack of regulatory requirements that most payment startups took one look at and decided were somebody else's problem.

Forage decided they were its problem. Founded in 2020 and shaped through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, the San Francisco company built a single API that lets a retailer or an online platform accept SNAP EBT - plus, increasingly, WIC and HSA/FSA - the way they already accept Visa. Behind that API is the part nobody wanted to do: Forage is one of only a handful of USDA-approved third-party processors for online EBT, and it walks each merchant through certification and launch by hand.

The result is the kind of company that is invisible in the best way. When you order groceries from a store that takes benefits online, there is a decent chance Forage is quietly settling that transaction. Its technology now runs at more than 100,000 store locations across all 50 states, including Dollar General, Save A Lot, and Gopuff, and on delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats. Payment volume grew 13x in a single year - the number infrastructure companies point to when they want you to understand that the boring thing is also the big thing.

What makes the business genuinely interesting is that it inverts the usual fintech instinct. Most payment startups chase the richest, highest-margin transactions they can find. Forage went the other way, toward the market with the most regulation, the tightest margins per user, and almost none of the hype - and served it better than the incumbents. The moat is not brand. It is the willingness to do USDA paperwork.

The people behind it. Forage was started by Justin Intal and engineer Victor Fimbres, who built the first version of the merchant API. The company's arc changed in 2022 when Ofek Lavian - who had led payments product at Uber, where he helped run a platform spanning 60-plus countries, and then at Instacart - joined as COO and is now co-founder and CEO. That pedigree matters: the two hardest things about EBT are payments engineering and grocery checkout, and Forage hired the people who had already done both at scale.

The consumer turn. In late 2025, Forage added a second act aimed directly at shoppers: the Forage app, a free tool that lets families check their EBT balance, find discounts, and earn cash-back rewards on everyday purchases. It passed 100,000 downloads shortly after launch, with a stated goal of reaching one million families by the end of 2026. Strategically, it turns Forage from pure back-end infrastructure into something with a direct relationship to the people the whole system is meant to serve.

Why now. The macro backdrop is unsubtle. Grocery prices are up more than 30% since the pandemic while wages have largely stayed flat, and by Forage's own framing, one in two Americans qualifies for SNAP at some point in their lives. Roughly 100 million Americans earn under $50,000 a year. A payment rail that makes benefits work everywhere groceries are sold is, in that light, less a niche and more a piece of consumer financial infrastructure that simply hadn't been built.

The pitch to grocers. Forage's numbers for retailers are specific enough to be checkable: a reported 15% lift in EBT revenue, an 11% increase in basket size, and 99.9% uptime. Those are the three figures a regional grocery chain's finance team actually cares about, and they explain why a global processor like Adyen chose to partner with Forage rather than build EBT acceptance itself.