In July 2020 Tide shut the door on small businesses that wanted government-backed loans. The money had run out.
The company had lent more than £50 million to nearly 2,000 firms under the Bounce Back Loan scheme, during the first months of the pandemic. Because Tide was not a bank, it could not use deposits to lend and did not qualify for the Bank of England's term funding scheme. It relied on investors' money, and when that was used up, it stopped taking applications. It kept asking the government for access.
The product was built to sit inside the tools sole traders already used.
That constraint tells you what Tide is. It started as Starfish Platform Limited, renamed and registered as Tide Platform Limited on 18 May 2015. Its founder was George Bevis, a former banker who knew what small-business customers disliked about branches: queues, forms and the wait. Tide won FCA permission in February 2016, raised a $2 million seed that July from Passion Capital, LocalGlobe and angels including Zoopla's Alex Chesterman and Wonga's Errol Damelin, and launched its app in January 2017.
The product was built to sit inside the tools sole traders already used. It was one of five fintech firms to launch Xero's bank-feed integration, and it partnered with PayPoint and the Post Office so cash could be deposited. Tide Credit, with iwoca, offered lending up to £150,000 from October 2017.
In March 2018 Bevis said he would step down as CEO. In August Oliver Prill, formerly COO at Kreditech, took over, and Eileen Burbidge became chair. The company had to prove it could grow without its founder at the front.
It also had to fight for fuel. In 2019 it received £60 million from the RBS remedies fund, through a partnership with ClearBank, which competitors criticised. A £44.1 million Series B led by SBI Group and Augmentum Fintech followed in October. A $100 million Series C in 2021 valued it at $650 million. In September 2025 a $120 million share sale involving TPG and Apax put it at $1.5 billion, with reports of around 1.6 million members across the UK, India and Germany, and CB Insights listing FY2024 revenue of $222 million.
The lesson is in the gap between 2020 and now. A company that was a brake-pedal away from the edge of a government scheme learned what it is to build on other people's balance sheets. For a founder, the question is not just what your customers want, but whose money you will be allowed to lend.