Infinity Ventures bets on the plumbing.

Before Mario Ruiz invested in the machinery of commerce, he sold sneakers. He started in middle school, moved more than a thousand pairs over seven years, and says the profits paid for college. Along the way came an education in payments, fulfillment, logistics and customer support. A desirable shoe was only the beginning. Someone still had to collect the money and get the box to the right door.

That distinction between the thing people want and the system that delivers it runs through Infinity Ventures. Ruiz founded the firm in 2021 with Jeremy Jonker and Jay Ganatra. All three came from PayPal. Their proposition is easy to grasp: financial experiences keep improving, while the infrastructure underneath leaves plenty of expensive problems unsolved.

A fund for the awkward bits

Infinity’s first fund, announced in May 2022, contained $158 million. A second, announced in October 2024, added $184 million. Together, those announcements describe $342 million of venture fund capital. This is money committed to investment funds, with returns depending on the companies they back. It should not be mistaken for Infinity’s sales or its valuation.

At the first announcement, the firm had already funded eleven companies. By the second, it reported 23. The sequence matters: Infinity began investing before making its public debut. This was an investing practice taking shape through deals, rather than a thesis waiting for its first experiment.

The partners bring experience that predates the firm. At PayPal, their work included venture investments and major acquisitions. Ganatra also ran Yelp’s online ordering business after working on its Eat24 acquisition. That background gives the operating pitch some substance: the people assessing a company have worked inside the larger businesses that may become its distributors, customers or eventual buyers.

Follow the transaction

Take Rainforest. Its customers are software platforms that want payments built into their products. A platform serving a particular industry can offer payment processing alongside its existing software. Rainforest supplies the underlying service. Infinity and Matrix Partners co-led its $29 million Series B in September 2025, extending an existing investment relationship.

Pagos addresses another part of the transaction. It helps payments teams monitor and optimize their payment systems, bringing visibility to problems spread across a merchant’s stack. For a business, the interesting question is practical: where are payments failing, and what should the team change? This is infrastructure with an identifiable user and an operational job.

Then there is Garage, a marketplace for equipment including fire trucks. Founder Martin Hunt’s experience as a firefighter exposed a clumsy resale process involving local auctions, Facebook groups and word of mouth. Garage brings discovery, payments and freight into a more coordinated transaction. Embedded financial services become useful because moving a costly vehicle requires more than finding someone who likes the listing.

Hunt’s account also complicates the usual software story. He says relationships and showing up in person mattered more than a digital strategy alone. Buyers needed confidence that the company would protect them through a consequential purchase. His lesson for other builders is specific: identify what makes a buyer hesitate, then design the business around earning that confidence.

The introduction that earns its keep

Infinity promises help with product roadmaps, distribution and go-to-market work. Founders hear versions of that promise frequently. The useful test is what actually happens after the investment.

In a June 2026 interview published by Infinity, Neo.Tax CEO Ahmad Ibrahim described a change in his own thinking. He had considered himself primarily a product person. Building the business taught him that the CEO had to sell, both to win customers and to sharpen the understanding of what they needed. Asked how investors helped, he singled out customer introductions.

“introducing us to customers”

Ahmad Ibrahim, Neo.Tax CEO, on useful investor help

It is a founder’s account on an investor’s website, so it deserves that context. Still, it offers a concrete standard. A useful introduction reaches someone with a relevant problem and a reason to buy. For a founder considering Infinity, the conversation should include which customers its network can reach, and how those conversations would inform the product.

The firm’s published initial checks run from $1 million to $1.5 million at pre-seed, $2 million to $4 million at seed, and $5 million to $10 million at Series A. Those ranges help founders assess fit before a meeting. Better Tomorrow Ventures and Commerce Ventures offer overlapping specialist mandates. Infinity’s particular argument is its partners’ payments and commerce experience.

The next bottleneck is trust

The portfolio now extends into the controls surrounding AI and financial operations. In June 2026, Infinity led Flagright’s $12.5 million Series A. Flagright combines financial-crime compliance functions with explainable AI. In September, Infinity and Frontline co-led HelmGuard’s $7.3 million seed round. HelmGuard uses AI agents to collect and assess risk evidence directly from source systems.

My reading of those investments is that the infrastructure thesis is following a new source of friction. As software takes on more decisions, businesses need ways to examine its behavior and establish whether it can be trusted. Faster execution creates another demand: evidence that the execution is sound.

That leaves a useful discipline for anyone copying the approach. Start with a costly, repeated problem. Find the buyer. Learn what blocks a purchase. Then judge the technology by whether it removes that obstacle. Specialist capital helps when the expertise and introductions match the business. Where demand is weak, integrations fail or compliance remains unresolved, a well-connected investor cannot do the product’s job.