YouLend and Dojo hit £2bn SME funding milestone via embedded finance

The six-year partnership has backed over 30,000 UK merchants, with total funding doubling in under 15 months.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 22 September 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

Bright natural light illuminates a bakery or cafe counter featuring a glass display case with pastries, a POS tablet and card reader, small plates, spoons, and jars on background shelves.

YouLend, the embedded financing platform, and Dojo, a UK payments technology provider, have together extended more than £2 billion in flexible capital to British small and medium-sized enterprises. The milestone, reached across six years of partnership and involving more than 30,000 merchants, marks a doubling of total volumes from £1 billion in less than 15 months, underlining accelerating demand for non-bank lending embedded within the payments infrastructure businesses already rely on day to day.

The model is structurally distinct from traditional SME lending. Rather than routing merchants to a separate credit provider, YouLend's financing sits natively inside the Dojo platform. Businesses can apply in a few clicks, receive funds within 24 hours, and repay as a fixed percentage of future card sales, so repayment obligations rise and fall in line with actual revenue. That revenue-linked structure, common in merchant cash advance markets, is increasingly positioned as a direct challenge to the fixed-repayment schedules of bank term loans.

Embedded finance as infrastructure, not product

The partnership's renewal figures are telling. Francisco Rubistein, VP of Growth at YouLend, notes that merchants who access funding through Dojo renew 83% of the time, and that access to embedded capital reduces merchant churn by up to 48%. These are not incidental metrics: they point to a strategic reality in which lending capability is becoming a retention and stickiness tool for payments platforms, rather than a standalone financial product.

This dynamic sits at the heart of the embedded finance thesis that has attracted significant capital across the fintech and payments landscape over the past three years. By bundling credit into the merchant's existing operational software, platforms create a compounding relationship: the more a business transacts, the more data the platform accumulates to underwrite future funding, and the less reason the merchant has to seek alternatives. YouLend already counts Stripe, Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy and Just Eat Takeaway.com among its platform partners, operating across more than 11 countries.

Macro tailwinds and the bank lending gap

The partnership's growth is also a direct function of tightening credit conditions in the broader UK lending market. The British Business Bank estimates that around half of small businesses now seek external finance to manage cash flow, yet the traditional bank approval process, slow, document-heavy, and indifferent to the seasonal or weather-driven volatility that defines small independent trading, disqualifies many of them before they start. Two of the merchants cited in the announcement illustrate this precisely: a Burley butcher who used repeat Dojo funding to bridge a period of weather-related footfall loss, and a Kent delicatessen that used it to buy equipment and refurbish the shopfront.

For cross-sector investors and capital allocators, the broader implication is clear. Embedded lending is quietly displacing a slice of the SME credit market that high-street banks have historically struggled to serve profitably. YouLend's infrastructure model, supplying the underwriting engine to payments platforms that own the merchant relationship, means the addressable market scales with every new platform partnership rather than with branch networks or loan-officer headcount.

Looking ahead, YouLend and Dojo have signalled plans to deepen their integration through Sidekick, described as an AI-driven digital business partner built into the Dojo platform. If Sidekick can layer predictive cash-flow analytics or automated funding triggers on top of the existing lending rails, it would move the proposition from reactive credit to proactive financial management, a step that would put it in more direct competition with the business banking and treasury management tools that challenger banks such as Starling and Tide have built their SME bases around. The competitive pressure that convergence creates, flowing from payments infrastructure into credit and now potentially into day-to-day financial operations, is the macro story embedded in a £2 billion milestone figure.