Skroutz and Bolt have launched lending programmes with finmid, the Berlin-based embedded lending company. Skroutz, Greece's largest online marketplace, now lends to its around 9,000 merchants through Skroutz Funding. Bolt, the Estonian mobility platform, has launched Bolt Vehicle Solutions, which gives its fleet operators access to multi-year vehicle financing. finmid announced both partnerships alongside a €17m funding round, bringing its total funding to €52m.
"Two years ago, embedded lending meant a cash advance for a restaurant," says finmid co-founder Alexander Talkanitsa. And for most platforms, that is still where it starts: a restaurant on a delivery app or a shop on a marketplace gets an advance and repays it as a share of its sales. Bolt and Skroutz now go a step further, Bolt with multi-year vehicle financing and Skroutz with its own money.
How Skroutz Funding works
Skroutz provides the capital, and finmid handles underwriting, servicing, and refinancing. It is the first finmid partnership where the money comes from the platform. Skroutz owns the product, the brand and the balance sheet, with finmid running the layer underneath. The refinancing part from finmid is the one bit that's a bit unclear to me, since Skroutz provides the capital. My guess is that finmid can move parts of the loan book to its refinancing partners once volumes grow, so Skroutz doesn't have to carry every loan on its own balance sheet forever.
Also, Greece isn't new territory for finmid. efood, Delivery Hero's food delivery brand in Greece, already offers loans with finmid. And with 30 European markets live, finmid is one of the few pan-European embedded lenders, which probably gives it easier access to deals like Skroutz than providers focused on a handful of core markets.
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From Bolt Food Finance to Bolt Vehicle Solutions
Bolt's new partnership with finmid isn't the first time the two companies are working together, as Bolt Food already uses finmid for lending. In September 2025, Bolt Food launched Bolt Food Finance in Latvia, offering restaurants up to €30,000 (or €200,000 on request), repaid as a fixed percentage of their monthly Bolt Food revenue. A year later, the partnership has moved into Bolt's core mobility business with a very different loan.
With Bolt Vehicle Solutions, fleet operators browse vehicles on the platform and, once they've picked one, apply for financing with finmid. They pay a fixed monthly instalment, and the car is theirs after the last payment. Operators can finance up to €400,000 over four years.
While this moves lending away from the usual cash-advance solutions, it doesn't sound fully embedded. It seems operators complete the application with finmid, which makes it more like a referral than a product Bolt owns. On the other hand, Bolt knows how many trips an operator's cars do and how much they earn, which is exactly the data a vehicle lender needs. If finmid uses that data for underwriting, it has at least an embedded flavour. For now, I'd put it on the borderline.
