Joshua Silver is founder and chief executive of Rainforest, the Atlanta, Georgia, company that lets software platforms offer merchant payments without becoming payment facilitators themselves. A Georgia Tech computer scientist who co-founded a healthcare payments company, he started Rainforest because he could not find the provider he kept recommending to clients.
Georgia Tech and Patientco
He grew up in Atlanta and earned a computer science degree at Georgia Tech, then worked on product and business development for the international team at CareerBuilder. In 2008 he co-founded Patientco, which handles patient payments for health systems and was one of the first payment facilitators. As its technical co-founder he architected a payments engine that grew to process more than $1 billion a year, then led its first enterprise revenue team. He pitched Patientco at Venture Atlanta in 2011. It was later sold to Waystar.
Fifty Consulting Engagements
In 2020 he founded LaunchPath Group, a consultancy on payments strategy, vendor selection and M&A for software platforms, and completed more than 50 engagements. A pattern emerged. The best software companies made huge new revenue from embedded payments, sometimes more than from their core software, but many were stuck with old processors and could not find a better one. Upstart providers mostly wrapped other processors, and large modern ones had been built for merchants. "Despite looking at every possible option, I didn't find any providers that checked all the boxes," he has written.
Building Rainforest
He founded Rainforest in 2022 at Atlanta Tech Village, and in 2023 it won the early-stage pitch competition at Venture Atlanta. In September 2025 it closed a $29M Series B led by Matrix and Infinity Ventures, bringing total funding to about $57.5M, after revenue grew more than tenfold between rounds.
He presented his first company at Venture Atlanta in 2011 and won its stage with his third twelve years later. He built Rainforest from the same Atlanta tech scene, to be the provider he had searched for and never found.
