YouLend and Dojo have now extended more than £2 billion in embedded finance to UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the two companies announced on September 14, 2026. Read against the pair’s £1 billion announcement in October 2024, the pace is the story: the first billion took roughly four years from the 2020 launch, while the second arrived in under 23 months.
The less obvious point is who else draws on the same capital. YouLend also funds Stripe Capital in the UK, Teya Cash Advance and Worldline’s Cash Advance, so the card-machine providers fighting over merchants increasingly compete on distribution rather than on who carries the credit risk.
What the £2 billion covers
Over six years the partnership has funded more than 30,000 Dojo merchants across hospitality, retail and e-commerce, with a Dojo customer approved for funding every 20 minutes, according to the release. More than 1,000 merchants have taken 10 or more renewals.
Merchants apply inside the Dojo platform they already use to take payments, receive funds in as little as 24 hours and repay a fixed percentage of future sales. Repayments therefore rise when trading is strong and fall when it slows.
Dividing the headline totals by the merchant counts the companies give (both stated as floors, so these are ceilings) shows cumulative funding per merchant moving from around £50,000 in 2024, when the partnership cited more than 20,000 businesses, to around £67,000 now. The merchant base grew by half while the funded total doubled, which points to repeat borrowing doing most of the work.
How rivals are responding
Dojo’s competitors have largely chosen the same supplier rather than build their own lending books. Stripe Capital’s UK page states that its financing is provided by YouLend. Worldline, which is refocusing after Crédit Agricole took full control of CAWL, launched Cash Advance with YouLend on January 19, 2026 in Belgium and the Netherlands, offering up to €250,000 in as little as 48 hours. SumUp, which recently launched a consumer bank account, is also named as a YouLend partner in the September release.
Teya is the exception worth watching. It launched Teya Cash Advance, powered by YouLend, for more than 30,000 UK members, but it had already put iwoca’s Flexi-Loan into its app on August 13, 2025. Running two funders gives an acquirer leverage on price and capacity that a single-supplier model lacks.
Banks are circling the same relationship. Lloyds’ move into card acceptance through Lloyds Accept, built with Stripe, places a lender with its own balance sheet at the point of sale where embedded finance offers are made.
What the executives said
“Merchants who access funding through Dojo renew 83% of the time – demonstrating genuine demand for this type of financing,” said Francisco Rubistein, VP of Growth at YouLend. He added that “business funding can reduce merchant churn by up to 48%, because when businesses access capital through a platform they already trust, they’re more likely to stay, spend, and grow.”
Michael Winwood, General Manager at Dojo, framed it as a distribution advantage: “By embedding funding directly into the Dojo platform, we’re making it easier for businesses to access the support they need, so they can focus on running and growing their business.”
The churn figure is the real business-to-business (B2B) pitch. For an acquirer, a cash advance is a retention product as much as a revenue line, because repayments come out of card takings processed on that provider’s terminals.
Why the renewal rate cuts both ways
When it signed Teya, YouLend quoted a repeat financing rate above 85% across its global book, so Dojo merchants renewing 83% of the time sit roughly in line with the wider portfolio. High renewal signals product fit, but it also means a large share of the £2 billion is the same merchants rolling advances through quieter months, an exposure that tracks UK hospitality and retail footfall closely.
The release cites British Business Bank figures showing around 50% of small businesses now seek external finance to manage cash flow. YouLend says it has supported more than 400,000 businesses across 11 or more countries, and US platforms are pursuing the same embedded finance model, as Cross River’s $400 million commitment showed in August.
What comes next
The companies say they will keep scaling the partnership through Sidekick, an AI-driven digital business partner, which would put funding offers inside a tool merchants open daily. My expectation is that more acquirers follow Teya and add a second funder: when one underwriter sits behind Stripe, SumUp, Worldline and Dojo at once, dual sourcing is the obvious hedge.
Bank credit is also flowing into the non-bank lenders themselves, as Lloyds’ £400 million facility for PremFina showed. That should keep embedded SME funding capacity growing even if venture money stays selective, and it makes a £3 billion Dojo milestone a question of when rather than whether.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
