Dojo and YouLend have extended more than £2bn in funding to UK small businesses, the two companies announced on 14 September. Dojo is the UK payments provider behind card terminals and online payments for hospitality, retail and e-commerce merchants, and YouLend is an embedded financing platform. Over six years, the partnership has funded more than 30,000 Dojo merchants, with a merchant approved every 20 minutes and more than 1,000 taking ten or more renewals. YouLend puts the renewal rate at 83%. The first £1bn was announced in October 2024, roughly four years after the partnership began in 2020.
Merchants apply from inside Dojo instead of going to a separate lender, receive funds in as little as 24 hours, and repay through a fixed share of future card sales. Dojo is a payments provider, so strictly speaking this sits outside my definition of embedded finance. I am covering it because of what happened in February, when Dojo launched Dojo Flex Funds with Liberis, which I wrote about in March. So why would a payments provider with a £2bn lending partnership bring in a second lender?
Why Dojo runs YouLend and Liberis side by side
From the outside, YouLend and Liberis look quite similar to me. Both offer revenue-based advances repaid as a share of daily card sales, and both sell to the same kinds of platforms. If that read is right, the second lender does not give Dojo a new product.
However, they seem to differ in where they sit in the merchant journey. Liberis is built into onboarding: with its Starter Capital product, eligible merchants (£60k+ annual revenue, 12+ months of trading) can get an offer from day one, assessed on trading data from outside Dojo. YouLend's offers seem to be purely based on Dojo's own transaction data, which points to merchants who already process there.
And there might be another reason: two funders give an acquirer leverage on price and capacity. YouLend also powers Stripe Capital in the UK and the cash advance products at Teya and Worldline, so a second lender may reduce Dojo's reliance on a provider its competitors share.
Teya and eBay add lenders for different products
While Dojo seems to work with two lenders to offer the same product to different merchants, Teya offers different products through different lenders. It works with both Liberis and YouLend for its Cash Advance, and with iwoca for its Flexi Loan (a line of credit repaid in fixed monthly instalments). Therefore, Teya merchants can choose between repayments that flex with card sales (Cash Advance) and repayments they can plan around (Flexi Loan).
eBay is another example of a company working with different lenders, and its UK setup comes closest to giving each lender a different job. YouLend has provided eBay's sales-based financing, a lump sum repaid as a percentage of daily gross sales, since the programme launched in 2021. Since 6 April 2026, Liberis has added Flexible Growth Financing, a funding limit that sellers can draw in full or in stages as needed. Sellers with offers from both can apply for each, but only one financing can run per eBay account at a time. eBay runs a second pairing in Germany, where iwoca has offered seller financing since 2022, and YouLend joined as another partner in May 2025.
