Tide turns unicorn as TPG leads $120m round at $1.5bn valuation

Tide, the London-based business banking platform for small firms, has raised more than $120m (£89m) in a round led by the US investment firm TPG, pushing its valuation to $1.5bn. Existing backer Apax Digital Funds also took part in the deal, which combined new money with a secondary sale of shares and makes Tide one of the few European fintechs to pass the unicorn mark this year.

The round, announced in September, lands four years after Tide last raised outside capital: a $100m round led by Apax in 2021 that valued the company at $650m. The new deal more than doubles that figure, a notable jump at a time when many European neobanks have struggled to raise at higher prices.

Where the money comes from, and where it goes

TPG invested through The Rise Funds, the impact-investing arm of its platform co-founded with Bono and Jeff Skoll in 2016, which has now backed more than 85 companies. Yemi Lalude, the TPG partner who leads the fund's work across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is joining Tide's board as part of the deal.

Tide said the new capital will fund its expansion outside the UK, speed up product development, and pay for further work on what it calls agentic AI. Morgan Stanley advised Tide on the transaction; Torch Partners advised TPG.

Oliver Prill, Tide's chief executive, framed the round as validation of the company's reach rather than a rescue or a pivot. "Securing this investment from TPG is a major milestone for Tide and a strong endorsement of our growth as the leading global business management platform serving 1.6m members worldwide," he said.

A profitable home market funding riskier bets abroad

Tide's pitch to investors rests on a split strategy: a mature, profitable UK business paying for growth in newer, unproven markets. In the UK, Tide says it serves close to 800,000 members and holds roughly 14% of the small business banking market, a position built up since the company's accounts launched in 2017 following George Bevis's founding of the business in 2015.

Outside the UK, the picture is less settled. Tide has built a base of more than 800,000 members in India, a market where growth has outpaced the UK recently. Germany, a market Tide entered only in May 2024, is a bigger prize on paper, with Tide pointing to the roughly six million SMEs operating there. France is newer still: Tide switched the country on in September 2025 with a single product, an affordable credit offer, rather than a full account launch.

That staged approach, entering with one narrow product before building out the rest of the platform, is a deliberate sequencing choice rather than a limitation. Tide says it plans to bring its full UK-style platform, accounts, invoicing, payroll and the rest of its SME toolkit, to each international market over time, rather than launching everything at once.

Why AI matters to the pitch

Tide's SME platform already bundles business accounts with invoicing, expense management, payroll and accounting tools, aiming to replace the patchwork of software that small businesses otherwise cobble together. Investment in AI is being pitched as a way to make that bundle cheaper to run and easier to extend, rather than as a product in its own right.

For Lalude, the appeal is as much about financial inclusion as returns. "Financial inclusion remains a global challenge for the millions of small businesses that are vital to economic growth and resilience," he said, adding that the fund wants to help Tide's model reach sole traders and micro-enterprises "from inception through to growth."

What is still unproven

A $1.5bn valuation sets a high bar for Tide's next test: whether the India, Germany and France operations can approach the UK business's profitability, rather than simply adding members. With more than 2,500 staff worldwide and backers including Anthemis, Augmentum Fintech, Creandum and SBI Group already on its cap table, Tide now has fresh capital and a board seat for TPG to show it can repeat its UK economics somewhere else. Whether France's narrow credit-only launch becomes a full platform, and on what timeline, is the detail Tide has yet to spell out.