UK fintech Tide has become a unicorn after raising new funding of $120 million led by TPG’s The Rise Fund and bringing the company’s valuation to around $1.5 billion. The milestone is a result of a plan that looks very much eastward: More than half of Tide’s 1.6 million global small-business customers are in India, now the startup’s biggest and fastest-growing market.
Created with the mission to make finance and admin as easy as possible for every small business owner, Tide has cobbled together a toolkit that rips up the patchwork of bank accounts, spreadsheets and point solutions many entrepreneurs piece together themselves.
The company is already profitable in the UK, where it has a roughly 14% share of the addressable market of small and medium businesses.
India is the growth engine driving Tide’s expansion
It is the scale story of Tide’s late-2022 India launch. The service has signed up over 800,000 Indian “members,” a number that exceeds its user base in the UK. India’s giant long tail of micro and small businesses, tens of millions by the government’s count, is an underbanked and under-automated sector that is particularly fertile ground for purpose-built financial services.
The drivers are structural. NPCI data indicates that UPI now handles well over 10 billion transactions in a typical month, making digital payments routine for even the most modest merchants. Meanwhile, GST compliance and e-invoicing thresholds are pushing businesses to be in the formal economy. That context gives Tide a neat wedge: link payments, accounting, tax and work in one workflow. According to CEO Oliver Prill, it’s cash itself that is the main competition for the upstart rather than platform rivals.
Tide estimates that millions of new micro and small businesses get operational on an annual basis in India. Many need help with the complex process of accepting UPI payments, navigating the GST and having access to formal credit — which is where PayNearby’s app and marketplace come into play.
Deal terms and why they matter for Tide’s unicorn round
The round is a combination of primary infusion and secondary share sales which also gives growth capital while providing liquidity to employees, early angels and minority investors. Existing backer Apax Digital Funds also reinvested, as did a number of other previous investors in the fintech upstart. The investment is being used to scale Klar’s model into other parts of Latin America, riding what it claims is very strong growth and signs that it has found product-market fit.
TPG’s impact-focused vehicle has supported dozens of mission-driven businesses worldwide, an appropriate fit for Tide’s thesis that simplifying back-office finance for the smallest enterprises can improve efficiency and help close credit gaps. International financial institutions have long identified a substantial global MSME financing gap, with estimates measuring in the trillions of dollars; India contributes a considerable share to that unfunded demand.
A stack built for small businesses across key markets
Tide’s proposition includes current accounts, invoicing, expense management, the ability to manage company payroll and accounting integrations alongside other add-ons such as business lending (loans), asset finance, or even incorporation itself.
In India, the company partners with about 25 lenders to connect members to credit products as well as fixed deposits, bill payments, bank transfers and ATM cash withdrawals.
The playbook is localization. Tide launched in Germany in 2024 and followed with a France launch soon after, offering localized language support and accommodating local compliance models. The UK is the profit engine and India’s growth anchor. Europe completes the roadmap for expansion as the business looks to mirror its approach in markets with a fragmented offering where incumbents have dominated.
Betting on agentic AI to automate finance for SMEs
With the new funds, Tide is doubling down on product development and what it refers to as “agentic AI” — software agents that can take action, not just make recommendations. In practice, that might mean an automated cash-flow forecaster ordering up supplier payments, machine intelligence in GST reconciliation or proactive nudges that compile loan documents and track applications to the right lending partners.
There are both operational and regulatory stakes. For small businesses, AI that eliminates manual, error-prone tasks can help them get paid or secure working capital faster. For Tide, hyper-reliability in automation must meet the requirements of regulators like the UK’s FCA and its counterparts across the EU and India that demand explainability, robust controls and safeguarding from bias in credit underwriting.
Execution risks and the upside for Tide’s global strategy
Combining banking, payments, lending and tax across more than one jurisdiction is complicated. Tide will have to continue adding market-specific features while building a tight core platform. Competition from traditional banks moving downstream and well-funded neobanks persists, along with the cyclicality of SME credit.
Still, the prize is not insignificant. If Tide can turn India’s digitisation wave — driven by UPI and tax formalisation — into long-term customer relationships, it would have created a defensible, high-frequency engagement layer for the world’s most numerous entrepreneurs. With more than 2,500 employees and a fresh commitment from TPG’s Rise Fund, the company has both the balance sheet and the mandate to try.
