Butter Payments, a business that has provided services to companies for managing customers’ subscription payments, has been acquired.
The company’s ex-CEO, Charles Rosenblatt, disclosed the sale in an interview last week. “We sold it about three weeks ago,” he said during a Friday interview. On his LinkedIn profile, Rosenblatt said the transaction took place in September.
He declined to name the company that has purchased Butter Payments, but said he expected the acquirer would make an announcement.
Butter Payments' business uses machine-learning algorithms and data from a consumer’s card and payment patterns to better understand why a subscription payment failed and how to resolve the problem.
“Non-sufficient funds is usually the leading source, but another one of the big ones is suspected fraud,” Rosenblatt said in a February interview.
In a press release earlier this year, Butter Payments cited the churn added up to a collective $440 billion annually in lost revenue for companies with subscription payment methods.
During the interview last week, Rosenblatt explained how the payments business has changed so that services like those offered by Butter Payments have been absorbed into broader suites of services owned by larger companies, causing more competitive pressure from bigger players. It was “very tough as a monoline business,” he said.
Rosenblatt likened the Butter Payments service to one of the myriad items listed on a restaurant’s menu. “What we built was better than anyone else, but for other companies, we were page 18 of a 20-page Cheesecake Factory menu,” Rosenblatt explained. “We were a better page 18. The problem is, what happens, competitively, is folks come in and offer page 18 for free, if you buy pages one through 17.”
Digital payments juggernaut Stripe being one of those competitors was part of the problem. Rosenblatt shared how one client told him about the unbeatable offer that Stripe made.
“Stripe basically said to them, all the money they're saving you, we'll just pay you that in cash and take it off your bill to not do business with them and stay with us for everything,” Rosenblatt said. “It's hard to beat that, and that was millions of dollars.”
Facing that kind of competition would have required Butter Payments to raise more funds, so developing an exit plan became the more viable option, the ex-CEO said.
“We had a couple new products, but we … would have had to go raise a ridiculous amount of money to go expand,” Rosenblatt said. “Our investors, candidly, didn't have an appetite for that.”
As of February, the San Francisco-based business had raised nearly $40 million as of earlier this year. At its peak size, Butter Payments had about 53 employees.
Rosenblatt joined Butter Payments in June 2025 as its chief commercial officer, according to his LinkedIn profile. In November of last year, he was promoted to CEO, with marching orders to turn the business around after excessive spending, he said.
Prior to that role, he has been an adviser to investment companies and previously a payments consultant, but he had also held executive posts at companies including PayQuicker, Payoneer and Velo Payments, his LinkedIn profile showed.
Rosenblatt said he has counseled other companies with standalone approaches similar to the Butter Payments business to be aware of the encroaching competition.
“My big message is, I think you're going to have a hard time as a standalone doing this,” Rosenblatt contended.
As for Rosenblatt, he plans to return to the cross-border payments niche where he spent much of his career. He’s on the hunt for new opportunities at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas this week.