Glovo and PragmaGO have launched PragmaCash for Glovo's merchant partners in Romania. Glovo is the Barcelona-founded on-demand delivery platform operating across 22 countries in Europe, Central Asia and Africa, working with several thousand merchants in Romania across restaurants, supermarkets, groceries and beauty. PragmaGO is the international brand of a Polish financial group specialising in B2B financing, including factoring, business loans and embedded solutions such as merchant cash advance and BNPL. Eligible businesses can access between RON 3,000 (~€600) and RON 200,000 (~€39k), with the limit set by past Glovo transaction revenues, repaid in equal weekly instalments over 4 or 12 months. Romania is the second market after Spain, where the two launched in mid-July with financing from €750 to €150,000, and Poland has been named as next.
A second lender, not the first
PragmaCash is not Glovo's first venture into merchant financing. Since late 2024, Glovo has run a cash advance programme powered by finmid. The offering is available in Spain, Portugal and Poland under its own branding, Glovo Capital, sitting inside Glovo Local, the platform's wider push to support small businesses. Spain now carries both programmes at once, and Poland is set to as soon as the rollout reaches it.
The two sit at opposite ends of how a platform can bring in a lender. Glovo Capital keeps the lender invisible and the product entirely Glovo's, from the interface to the customer relationship. PragmaCash flips that: the product carries PragmaGO's name. Glovo's own role is to give PragmaGO a dedicated space inside the app, as Glovo described it. Glovo Capital is embedded finance, and PragmaCash sits closer to distribution into Glovo's merchant base, though that difference is not automatically a weakness on PragmaGO's side. Where a provider like finmid sells to platforms and stays invisible to the merchant, PragmaGO has spent years building a direct brand with businesses, with almost 24,000 entrepreneurs in Poland and more than €200m disbursed in 2025. A merchant who has already seen the PragmaGO name elsewhere may well convert better on a branded offer than an unbranded one, and my guess is that acquisition, rather than integration depth, is what the brand is doing here.
PragmaGO's habit of building a local entity rather than plugging into an existing licence runs deeper than Romania. Danuta Czapeczko, VP Strategic Partnerships at PragmaGO, explained during our podcast on embedded finance in CEE that B2B lending does not passport across the EU the way payments do, and that acquiring a locally licensed lender (which became Telecredit IFN in Romania) was the fastest route into Romania. The same logic runs behind PragmaGO's separate entity in Spain and the one due to start in Croatia this year: one licence per market, rather than one lending layer stretched across all of them.
One lender first, several later
That last point came up at our virtual event on embedded lending in July, where around 25 practitioners walked through why platforms rarely stop at a single lender. Most start with one because it is the simplest path, then add a second once it becomes clear that not every borrower wants the same thing: one needs money today and will pay for the speed, another has years of trading history and expects pricing closer to what a bank would offer.
Ownership in flux
Glovo's own ownership is shifting at the same time. Uber agreed on July 16th to acquire Delivery Hero, Glovo's parent, in a deal worth around $14.8bn. Glovo does not get sold as one piece, though: Uber keeps 17 of its markets, including Italy, Croatia and Ukraine, while Spain, Portugal, Poland, Romania and Moldova, the exact markets carrying Glovo's lending programmes, go to New York investment firm SSW Partners as part of a separate $1.6bn transaction. Uber Eats already runs its own merchant financing in the UK with Pipe, so whatever happens next with Glovo's two lenders will be decided under new ownership rather than Uber's.
