Tide, a London-based business management platform, has become the latest UK fintech to achieve unicorn status, securing more than £89 million to lift its valuation to over £1.1 billion.
This milestone, announced on Tuesday, places Tide alongside Britain’s growing constellation of financial technology unicorns, joining the likes of Revolut, Monzo, Starling Bank and Zopa as a UK-headquartered FinTech with a 10-figure valuation. Yet Tide’s ascent tells a more intriguing story than simple venture capital success: it reveals how digital disruption is finally reaching the unglamorous but vast market for small business financial services.
The numbers tell the tale. Tide’s platform serves 1.6m members across the UK, India, Germany and France, with more than half of them based in India, the company’s largest and fastest-growing market. In Britain, the company claims 14% of the SMB market, a remarkable achievement for a firm that launched only in 2017.
The geography of Tide’s expansion is particularly telling. While many British fintechs have focused on developed markets, Tide has embraced the complexity of emerging economies. India, with its massive population of micro-enterprises and historically underbanked small business sector, represents precisely the kind of market where traditional banks have struggled to serve profitably. Each of these banks is to open at least 25% of its branches in areas that do not have any other bank branches (unbanked regions), highlighting the persistent challenge of financial inclusion in developing markets.
The funding itself comes through TPG’s Rise Funds, TPG’s global impact investing platform, which partners with high-growth firms to deliver financial returns alongside scalable positive change. This marriage of profitability and social impact reflects a broader trend in fintech investment, where addressing underserved markets has become both a moral imperative and a business opportunity.
Traditional banks, for their part, have found small business banking a challenging proposition. The economics are unforgiving: micro-enterprises require significant support but generate modest fees. SMEs embrace digital bookkeeping, invoice financing, and expense-management apps to offset reduced branch coverage by traditional lenders. This creates a perfect storm of unmet demand and technological opportunity that fintechs like Tide are uniquely positioned to exploit.
The broader context makes Tide’s success even more significant. The UK fintech sector boasts more than 1,800 high-growth fintech companies currently active and 18 fintech unicorns, with collective funding of £31.0b in equity funding. This ecosystem effect means that Britain is not merely producing individual success stories, but building a comprehensive alternative to traditional financial infrastructure.
Yet challenges remain formidable. Regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions creates complexity that scales exponentially with geographic expansion. In India, for instance, banking regulations require specific attention to priority sector lending and regional presence requirements. Moreover, the small business banking market, while large in aggregate, consists of millions of individual relationships that must be acquired and retained one customer at a time.
The competitive landscape is also intensifying. Traditional banks, having initially dismissed fintech challengers, are now investing heavily in digital transformation. Meanwhile, technology giants like Amazon and Google are eyeing the small business services market with their own suite of financial products.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Tide’s model extends beyond traditional banking into what it calls “business management”—offering tools for registration, accounting, payroll, and administration alongside financial services. This ecosystem approach recognises a fundamental truth about small businesses: their financial needs cannot be divorced from their operational challenges.
The ultimate success of Tide and its peers will depend on their ability to demonstrate that serving small businesses profitably at scale is not merely possible, but sustainable across economic cycles. Traditional banks abandoned this market not through lack of trying, but because the unit economics proved challenging.
The £1.1 billion valuation suggests investors believe the digital-first model can succeed where traditional banking has struggled. If they are right, it may mark not merely the rise of another fintech unicorn, but the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of how capitalism’s smallest enterprises access financial services.
For millions of small business owners from Birmingham to Bangalore, the implications could be profound. After decades of making do with inadequate financial infrastructure, they may finally have found their tide.
The revolution in finance continues to wash over new shores, carrying with it the promise of inclusion for capitalism’s forgotten army.
