Wayflyer

The working capital problem has plagued e-commerce since e-commerce has existed. A brand selling on Shopify or Amazon can grow at impressive rates yet find itself chronically short of cash, because it must pay suppliers weeks before products reach customers and revenues materialize. Traditional banks don't understand this model, lack the data to evaluate it, and move far too slowly for the pace of a digital merchant. Wayflyer was founded in 2019 precisely to fix this disconnect. Founded in Dublin by Aidan Corbett and Jack Pierse, the Irish fintech built a Revenue-Based Financing system designed specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. The mechanics are straightforward: Wayflyer advances capital — from tens of thousands to millions of dollars — and is repaid through a fixed percentage of future daily revenues, until the advanced amount plus a flat fee is fully recovered. There are no fixed monthly instalments, no collateral requirements, no bank covenants. Repayment slows when sales dip and accelerates when they rise, adapting to the natural rhythm of the business. What makes the model possible is data analysis. Before extending any financing, Wayflyer accesses — with the merchant's consent — their sales platforms (Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, Magento), payment gateways, and advertising accounts, building a risk profile in minutes that a traditional bank would take weeks to reconstruct manually. Typical clients are DTC brands with at least six months of trading history and monthly revenue of at least $10,000. After five years of operations, the numbers speak clearly. At its fifth anniversary in April 2025, Wayflyer announced it had deployed over $5 billion in working capital to more than 5,000 merchants across 11 countries. In the US alone — its largest market — financing exceeds $2.8 billion to over 2,000 businesses. The company has raised a total of more than $1.24 billion in equity and debt across eight rounds, reaching a valuation of $1.6 billion in 2022. In February 2026 it closed a $250 million debt round. Innovation has not stopped at the financing model. In 2025, Wayflyer launched an AI Inventory Predictor, a machine learning tool that signals to merchants when and how much to reorder, transforming the company from a simple credit provider into an operational partner. The same year saw the introduction of Hosted Capital, a white-label offering that allows e-commerce platforms to embed Wayflyer financing directly into their own user experience. The expansion beyond e-commerce is the most ambitious move of recent months. In October 2025, Wayflyer launched an Innovation Fund to pilot financing for SMBs in adjacent sectors — physical retail, SaaS, consumer services, healthcare — where the RBF model can be applied with limited adjustments. The potential market across these new verticals runs into tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the US and UK alone. Wayflyer demonstrates that the most effective fintech is not the one that replicates banking products in digital form, but the one that designs financial instruments natively compatible with how digital businesses actually operate. In an increasingly competitive e-commerce ecosystem, the ability to access fast, flexible capital can be the difference between growth and stagnation.