Get Forward Customer Count (2026)

Forward has not publicly disclosed an absolute revenue figure, but Brandon Lloyd told Latka in June 2026 that May 2025 was up 800 percent year over year on the company's primary internal metric, which Lloyd defines as software platform payments income rather than gross payment volume. Lloyd also stated that the company has been growing at a rate greater than 20 percent month over month consistently since founding.

Forward had more than 100 vertical software and AI platforms live and processing payments as of the June 2026 interview, with thousands of underlying merchants transacting through those platforms. Lloyd clarified that the company's clients are the software platforms, while the merchants are those platforms' own customers.

Forward targets software platforms with at least 3,000 to 5,000 customers, and will refer smaller or earlier-stage companies to Stripe rather than onboard them. Lloyd told Latka that at no cost, Forward conducts an evaluation for each prospective platform to determine how much payments income they are leaving on the table, and will only proceed if it can generate 3 million to 30 million dollars of incremental payments income for that client. Pricing to the software platform is 14 basis points for technology, money movement, and risk services alone, or 28 basis points when the company's attach rate maximization services are included. The standard Stripe processing rate of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents was cited as the baseline that roughly half of Forward's clients were paying before switching.

Forward earns 14 to 28 basis points of spread on payments processed through its platform, depending on whether a client uses only Forward's technology and money movement infrastructure or also engages its attach rate sales services, which the company calls Maximize. Lloyd described the available spread between what a merchant pays and the cost of interchange as approximately 100 basis points, of which 70 to 80 percent should flow to the software platform under Forward's model, compared to the 20 to 30 percent that software companies typically retain when working with legacy payment processors.

The company's growth model is leveraged: rather than signing up individual merchants, Forward signs up software platforms that already have thousands of merchants, allowing compounding volume growth. Lloyd identified attach rate as the primary business lever, defining it as the share of a software platform's customers that are actively using payments. He stated that simply adding a payments button to a platform will cap attach rate at 20 percent, while active outreach and sales support can push attach rates above 80 percent. Forward's Maximize service is designed to close that gap. Lloyd cited ServiceTitan, Toast, and Mindbody as examples of software companies that have achieved high attach rates.

Lloyd framed the company's north star metric as software platform payments income rather than gross payment volume, arguing that growing GMV while keeping the majority of spread, as a Stripe-style model does, would not reflect the outcome Forward is trying to drive for its clients. The company has not disclosed gross margin, burn rate, runway, or profitability. Those topics were not discussed in the interview. The incremental payments income range Forward targets for new platform clients is 3 million to 30 million dollars, and client integration and launch time is less than 30 days. Approximately 50 percent of Forward's clients upgraded from Stripe.

Employee count and team composition were not discussed in the interview.