YouLend vs Outfund: the two that still repay from sales
By the CapExpand team
Reviewed by Alex Beardsley, Founder · UK commercial finance broker
Facts checked 7 September 2026 · first published 7 September 2026
Read against youlend.com, out.fund’s live UK pages, an Internet Archive capture of Outfund from July 2025, both firms’ Companies House filings and the FCA’s EMD agents file.
Provider A
YouLend
Advance repaid from card and platform sales
Provider B
Outfund
Revenue-share or fixed repayments, £10k to £500k
Most of the UK lenders that sold sales-linked money in 2021 have either stopped or moved to fixed instalments. These two have not. YouLend still takes a percentage of every sale until a fixed fee is cleared, collected through a settlement account it runs under its own payment licence. Outfund still offers a revenue-share option, though it now sits beside a fixed-repayment version of the same facility, and both are collected by direct debit rather than by intercepting your takings.
The reason to read further is that one of these lenders has grown into the largest embedded funder in the country and the other has spent the past year making itself smaller. Outfund's advertised ceiling has fallen from £10 million to £500,000, its revenue floor from £25,000 a month to £10,000, and its ownership has moved to an Irish holding company. Both changes matter to a business deciding where to send its bank data, and neither is announced anywhere on Outfund's site. We have set out what each one publishes, what it does not, and where the money actually comes out.
The 60-second answer
YouLend tends to fit if
- You take card payments in a shop, salon, restaurant or pub, which is the sales data YouLend reads best
- You already sell through Dojo, Amazon, eBay, Just Eat, Teya or Worldline and would rather apply from inside that account
- You want the repayment to shrink on its own in a quiet week rather than argue with a direct debit
- You need more than £500,000, which is above the most Outfund now advertises
- You want an approval in a day rather than three, and you can set up a settlement account quickly
Outfund tends to fit if
- You sell online through Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, Adyen or WooCommerce and have no card terminal for YouLend to read
- You have six months of trading and about £10,000 a month coming in, and you want a number rather than a maze
- No director will sign a personal guarantee, and you want that written down before you apply
- You want a published worked example to argue from, which Outfund gives and YouLend does not
- You are registered in the UK, Spain or Germany, and £10,000 to £500,000 covers what you need
An online seller with no terminal is Outfund's natural applicant and an awkward one for YouLend's core product, though YouLend's own accounts say it has started decisioning on non-card sales. A shop with a card machine is the reverse. The businesses that could genuinely take either are ecommerce brands turning over £30,000 to £200,000 a month with a Shopify or Stripe account and a small amount of counter trade.
At a glance
| Feature | YouLend | Outfund |
|---|---|---|
| Legal entity | YouLend Limited (12576377), 90 High Holborn, London | MTL Financial Ltd (10923992), trading as Outfund, Covent Garden |
| Ownership | EQT, through BC Midco Pte. Ltd of Singapore | VVOF Holdings Limited, Ireland, since August 2025; accounts say no ultimate controlling party |
| Founded | 2016 on its about page, 2015 on its impact page; the trading entity was incorporated April 2020 | 2017, by Daniel Lipinski, who left the board on 1 September 2025 |
| Range | Up to £2,000,000; no minimum published. Dojo and eBay routes cap at £1,000,000 | £10,000 to £500,000 in the FAQ and on the partner page; £10,000 to £300,000 on the funding page |
| Pricing | A single fixed fee, no rate card, no published range | One fee, no interest; the offer builder shows 6.8% on £150,000 over 9 months |
| Term | No fixed term. Dojo’s page says nine months is typical and twelve the maximum | 3, 6, 9 or 12 months |
| Repayment | A percentage of each day’s sales, taken through a YouLend settlement account | Direct debit, daily or weekly, either revenue share or a fixed amount |
| Minimum trading | Not published | 6 months; the July 2025 site said 12 |
| Minimum revenue | Not published | £10,000 a month; the July 2025 site said £25,000 |
| Personal guarantee | Not published | “No mandatory personal guarantees”, alongside a customer choice of “security level” |
| Where the money lands | Your bank account; card receipts then route through the settlement account | An Outfund wallet with a virtual card, from which you transfer or pay invoices |
| Countries | 10 or more, by its own count | UK, Spain and Germany |
| FCA | Payment institution, FRN 947287, for the settlement accounts; the financing is unregulated | EMD agent of Modulr FS, FRN 902840, for the wallet; the lending is unregulated |
| Latest accounts | FY to 31 Mar 2025: revenue £171.5m, profit £8.8m | FY to 31 Jan 2025: turnover £6.7m, loss £7.0m, average staff 12 |
Published criteria as at 7 September 2026. Outfund’s pages were read live; YouLend’s partner figures come from a January 2026 capture of Dojo’s funding page. Every figure is subject to the lender’s own checks.
Who YouLend actually is
YouLend Limited sells almost nothing under its own name. It builds the funding product that sits inside somebody else's app: Dojo's core business funding, Amazon's UK cash advance and Flexible Financing Line, the YouLend half of eBay Seller Capital, Just Eat's partner funding, and since January 2026 the cash advances at Teya and Worldline. Its homepage counts more than 300 partners and 370,000 businesses funded. That is the whole model. The platform already holds the sales history, so YouLend can price from data rather than from a business plan, and it says it approves nine out of ten applicants.
Two consequences follow for a borrower. The first is speed: approval in as little as 24 hours and funds in as little as 48 hours after that, because there is no document-gathering stage. The second is the settlement account. YouLend holds an FCA payment-institution licence, FRN 947287, granted on 29 June 2023, and that licence exists so it can run the account your card processor pays into. YouLend takes its share of each day's takings there and forwards the rest. The licence covers the account and not the advance; YouLend's own regulatory page says its UK financing agreements are not FCA-regulated. Our YouLend review goes through each partner route and what it changes.
What YouLend does not publish is the reason this page needs care. There is no rate card, no repayment-percentage range, no minimum advance, no minimum trading period and no statement either way on personal guarantees. The maximum is £2,000,000 direct, with Dojo and eBay capping their own routes at £1,000,000. Dojo's page supplies the two most useful numbers anywhere in public: advances average 0.8 to 1 times monthly card turnover, and payback is typically nine months with a twelve-month maximum.
Who Outfund actually is
Outfund is a trading name of MTL Financial Ltd, company 10923992, incorporated in August 2017 and registered at Shelton Street in Covent Garden. Daniel Lipinski founded it, raised £37m of debt and equity led by Fuel Ventures in December 2020 and a £115m Series A in April 2022, and picked up Clearco's UK and Irish clients when Clearco pulled out of Europe in August 2022. For a couple of years Outfund was one of two or three names a British ecommerce brand would be given if it asked for revenue-based finance.
The 2026 product is a single facility with a choice of repayment. Take the revenue-share version and the payments move with your sales; take the fixed version and they do not. Either way collection is by direct debit, daily or weekly, over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, and the fee is one number with no interest on top. Money is paid into an Outfund wallet rather than straight to your bank: there is a virtual Visa card, invoice payments that the site says are processed within two working days, and bank transfers out. That wallet is why Outfund appears on the FCA register at all, as an EMD agent of Modulr FS Limited under FRN 902840 since 31 July 2020. It is a payments registration, not a lending permission.
The criteria are short and they are published: six months of trading, roughly £10,000 a month coming in, and a business registered in the UK, Spain or Germany. Underwriting runs off a read-only Open Banking connection or bank statements, plus whichever of Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, Adyen, WooCommerce, Xero or QuickBooks you use. Amazon is not on the list. The credit check at underwriting is soft, though the terms allow checks on owners and directors once you go further. Once you have repaid about a third of a facility you can apply to top it up.
What Outfund cut in a year
Put the July 2025 version of out.fund next to the live one and the change is hard to miss. Fourteen months ago the homepage advertised business loans of £25,000 to £10 million, twelve months of trading, £25,000 a month in revenue and offers as fast as 24 hours, over a strapline of 700-plus brands funded. Today it advertises £10,000 to £500,000, six months of trading, £10,000 a month, an offer in three days and 2,000-plus customers. The top of the range has gone, the entry bar has been lowered, and the promise on speed has moved from one day to three.
None of that is announced. There is no blog post, no press release and no note on the funding page, which still contradicts the FAQ by describing a tailored offer of £10,000 to £300,000 while the FAQ, homepage and broker page all say £500,000. Read as a whole it looks like a lender that has narrowed to the deal size it can fund and widened the door to fill the book. For a business borrowing £40,000 that is close to irrelevant. For one that borrowed £600,000 from Outfund in 2024 and expected a renewal at the same size, it is the whole story, and it is a question to put in writing before you connect anything.
What you actually pay
Outfund is the rare lender in this market that shows you arithmetic. Its offer builder opens on £150,000 over nine months at a 6.8% fee: a facility fee of £10,200 and £160,200 to repay. It does not publish a fee range, so 6.8% is an illustration rather than a price list, but it is a real number on a real page and you can hold an offer up against it. The same page also shows “net funding” of £147,750, which is £2,250 less than the £150,000 headline. Nothing on the page explains the gap. It works out at 1.5% of the facility, which would be consistent with a deduction at drawdown, and we would want that confirmed in writing before signing, because it changes the cost of the cash you receive from 6.8% to about 8.4%.
YouLend gives you nothing to hold up. Its pages say “no interest, pay only a single fixed fee” and stop there. The fee is set per offer from your sales data, and the FAQ confirms that where a third party introduced you, YouLend may pay them a commission that is typically a percentage of that fee. There is no published range for the percentage of sales it sweeps either. What you can do is convert whatever fee lands in front of you into a monthly rate using the payback period, and our MCA cost guide sets out the arithmetic. A 10% fee cleared in nine months is not the same money as a 10% fee cleared in eighteen.
Neither lender publishes early-settlement terms. Outfund's site is silent on it and YouLend's is too. With a fixed fee the default position across this market is that clearing early ends the payments without reducing the total, so treat that as the working assumption and get the answer in the agreement rather than from a salesperson.
How the money comes out
This is the difference that survives every change of rate card. YouLend does not ask you for money. It sits between your card processor and your bank, takes its percentage of what settles, and passes on the rest. If you have a dead February the payment is smaller in February. Nothing bounces, because nothing is being collected from your account.
Outfund collects. Even the revenue-share option is a direct debit, recalculated against your sales rather than taken out of them, so it lands on a bank account that has to have money in it that morning. The fixed option is a flat instalment. Neither is unusual, and for an online business with no merchant acquirer there is no other way to do it, but a business used to a card-sweep should understand that it is swapping a mechanism that cannot bounce for one that can. What a direct debit does to a bad month is a question worth modelling before you sign, not after.
Guarantees, and who says what
Outfund states its position: no dilution, no equity, and “no mandatory personal guarantees”. The word doing the work there is mandatory. Elsewhere the same site invites you to choose your “repayment style, term length, and security level”, which reads as an offer that can carry security if you want a lower fee. Reviewers on Trustpilot have complained about a director's indemnity appearing in contracts; we have not seen an Outfund agreement that shows one, so we report the claim as a claim and suggest you read the schedule of the contract you are actually offered.
YouLend says nothing at all on the subject, on any public page. That is not the same as taking no guarantee and it is not the same as taking one. Wayflyer's competitor page asserts that YouLend guarantees are commonly requested and attributes that to unnamed independent reviews; we do not repeat a rival's characterisation as fact. If a guarantee decides the deal for you, ask YouLend in writing before your sales data goes anywhere. Our guide to personal guarantees sets out what a director is signing up to.
What the accounts and the register say
We read both sets of filings, because a lender's own numbers tell you what it is able to write this quarter. YouLend's group accounts to 31 March 2025 show revenue of £171.5m, up from £118.7m, and a profit of £8.8m against £1.2m the year before. Its ultimate controlling party is EQT, the Swedish private equity house, through a Singapore holding company, with Banking Circle a sister company under the same control. A private securitisation with J.P. Morgan announced in January 2024 runs to £4 billion, and a forward-flow facility from Värde Partners announced in March 2026 adds up to $225m against US receivables.
MTL Financial's group accounts to 31 January 2025 read very differently. Turnover £6.68m, down from £7.62m. Cost of sales £9.91m against £5.35m, giving a gross loss of £3.23m. Loss for the year £6.98m after £2.14m the year before. Average employees 12, down from 38. The going-concern note depends on continued support from the parent and on a group funding round “expected to take place in the near term”. Those accounts were filed on 16 April 2026, more than two months late; a first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off was issued on 31 March 2026, suspended on 8 April and discontinued on 18 April, two days after the accounts landed. The company has been trading throughout and the notice was withdrawn, but it is a matter of public record and it is the sort of thing a director should know before handing over bank access.
Alongside that sits the ownership change. Since August 2025 Outfund has been part of VVOF Holdings Limited, an Irish company, which the accounts describe as both the immediate and ultimate parent with no ultimate controlling party behind it. The group pairs Outfund with Viceversa, a Milan and Dublin embedded-finance platform, and the site footer now reads Milan, Dublin and London. One director remains on the UK company, appointed in August 2025 and resident in Ireland; the founder and two other directors left across 2025 and 2026. We are not saying money is at risk: a drawn facility is drawn, and repayments run whatever the lender's balance sheet looks like. We are saying this is a lender that has changed hands and shrunk its appetite, which is exactly what its criteria now show.
The bit nobody mentions
With Outfund, the wallet. Your capital does not arrive in your business current account. It arrives in an Outfund wallet with a virtual card, and you move it out or pay suppliers from there, with invoice payments quoted at two working days. For a brand paying a factory that is fine. For a business that needs £80,000 in its own account on Friday to cover a payroll run it is a step nobody mentions in the sales call. The most recent Trustpilot review on the profile, dated 29 December 2025, is a two-star complaint about invoices sitting as pending. Ask what the transfer-out timing is before you accept.
With YouLend, the plumbing. Using its settlement account is a condition of the financing under the payment-account terms, and closing that account before the advance is repaid may trigger an event of default. If you run one Dojo terminal you will never notice. If you run terminals from two acquirers and an online checkout, every route has to be pointed at the new account, and the days that takes are the days between “approved” and “funded”. Outfund never touches your card processing at all, which is the quiet advantage of a direct debit.
Worked examples
Outfund publishes a worked example, so the first card below is its arithmetic rather than ours. YouLend publishes no rate and no repayment percentage, so the second card runs one advance at three assumed fees to show the shape rather than to price it. Neither is a quote.
Worked example · Outfund
£150,000 over nine months, using Outfund’s own published figures
Assumptions (illustrative, not a quote)
- Facility £150,000 over 9 months, the default in Outfund’s offer builder
- Fee 6.8%, as shown on that page; Outfund publishes no fee range
- Weekly direct debit, on the fixed-repayment option
- Nine months treated as 39 weeks
The arithmetic
- Facility fee: £150,000 × 6.8% = £10,200
- Total repayable: £160,200, exactly as the page states
- Weekly debit: £160,200 ÷ 39 = £4,108, about £17,800 a month
- The same page shows “net funding £147,750”, which is £2,250 below the headline and is not explained. If that is a deduction at drawdown, the cash received is £147,750 and the cost of it is £12,450, or 8.4% rather than 6.8%
- On the revenue-share option the debit moves with sales, so nine months is an estimate and the fee stays £10,200 either way
Two questions for the offer letter: does the full £150,000 reach the wallet, and how quickly can it be moved to your own bank account.
Worked example · YouLend
£150,000 advance repaid from card takings, at three assumed fees
Assumptions (illustrative, not a quote)
- Advance £150,000 against card sales of £160,000 a month, which is 0.94 times monthly card turnover and inside the 0.8 to 1 times average Dojo publishes
- Sweep 12% of sales (assumed; YouLend publishes no percentage range)
- Fee assumed at 8%, 12% and 16%, because YouLend publishes no rate card
- Sales steady month to month
The arithmetic
- At a 12% fee: total repayable £150,000 × 1.12 = £168,000
- Monthly sweep: 12% of £160,000 = £19,200
- £168,000 ÷ £19,200 = 8.75 months, inside the twelve-month maximum Dojo quotes
- At 8% the total is £162,000 and payback is about 8.4 months; at 16% it is £174,000 and about 9.1 months. The fee moves the cost far more than it moves the term
- A quarter at £120,000 a month drops the sweep to £14,400 and pushes payback past ten months. The fee does not change
Only the fee on your own offer counts. Run it through this arithmetic and you will know what it costs per month, which is the number that compares with anything else on your desk.
Who fits where
Profiles we meet, set against what each lender publishes. Where we say neither, it means the published criteria do not obviously cover the business and the answer comes from an enquiry rather than a website.
| Business | Likely fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Café with a Dojo terminal, £22,000 a month on cards, wants £18,000 for a kitchen refit | YouLend | Card takings are the data YouLend prices from, and the application starts inside the Dojo account. Outfund lists no card-acquirer connections at all. |
| Shopify brand, £45,000 a month through Stripe and Shopify, ten months trading, wants £60,000 | Outfund | Clears the six-month and £10,000-a-month bar, and Shopify and Stripe are both named connections. No card terminal for YouLend’s core product to read. |
| Amazon FBA seller, £30,000 a month, wants £40,000 for Q4 stock | YouLend | Amazon’s own UK cash advance is YouLend, so the offer appears in Seller Central. Amazon is not among the platforms Outfund lists. |
| Subscription box, limited company, £70,000 a month through Stripe, no terminal | Outfund | Subscription is on Outfund’s sector list and the data connection is straightforward. Worth asking YouLend too, since its accounts say it now decisions on non-card sales. |
| Wholesaler needing £700,000 against a supplier order | YouLend, to check | Above the £500,000 Outfund now advertises. YouLend goes to £2,000,000 direct, though the advance is still sized against sales rather than against the order. |
| Restaurant group, three sites, terminals from two acquirers, £180,000 a month | YouLend | The sweep follows each site’s takings without a direct debit to fund. Allow time to point every acquirer at the settlement account before the money moves. |
| D2C brand selling into Spain and Germany as well as the UK | Outfund | Those are the three countries Outfund says it supports. YouLend operates in ten or more, but its UK route prices from UK sales. |
| Business whose director will not sign a guarantee under any circumstances | Outfund, in writing | Outfund publishes “no mandatory personal guarantees”; YouLend publishes nothing either way. Get the answer confirmed on the offer rather than from a web page. |
General information on how the lenders differ, not a recommendation. We arrange finance; the lender decides, and you choose.
Our verdict
Outfund in September 2026 is a £10,000 to £500,000 lender for online sellers who want repayments that follow their sales, will not give a personal guarantee, and can live with an offer that takes three days. Inside that description it does something no rival on our panel does: it shows you a fee on a worked example before you apply. Outside it, the picture is harder. The ceiling has fallen by 95% in fourteen months, the accounts to January 2025 show a £6.98m loss on £6.68m of turnover with headcount down from 38 to 12, and the company went through a strike-off notice in the spring before filing late. A drawn facility is not at risk from any of that. Your renewal in nine months might be.
Anyone with a card machine goes to YouLend first, and it is not close. YouLend is priced from card data, met inside the platform you already use, approved in a day, and backed by a profitable balance sheet with EQT behind it. The price is that you get no published figure to argue with, no stated position on guarantees, and a settlement account that has to be plumbed in before you see the money. Both lenders are on the panel we place through, so the practical route is to put the same set of figures to both and compare the two offers rather than the two websites. Our revenue-based finance hub covers the rest of the sales-linked market, including the lenders that quietly left it.
Want both checked against your numbers?
One enquiry, and we tell you which of YouLend, Outfund or the rest of the panel your figures actually fit before anything is submitted.
Frequently asked questions
Sources and method
Facts on this page were checked against the sources below on 7 September 2026. Where a lender does not publish a figure we say so rather than estimate it.
- YouLend, merchants page (up to £2,000,000; speed claims)
- YouLend, FAQs (single fixed fee; £2,000,000 maximum; introducer commission)
- YouLend, regulatory information (FRN 947287; financing not FCA-regulated)
- YouLend, payment account terms and conditions (settlement account as a condition of financing)
- YouLend, about page (founded 2016)
- YouLend, impact page (“since we began in 2015”)
- YouLend, UK press page (J.P. Morgan £4bn securitisation, January 2024; Värde forward flow, March 2026)
- Companies House, YouLend Limited 12576377 (group accounts to 31 March 2025)
- Dojo, business funding page (Internet Archive, 31 January 2026)
- Open Banking Expo, Teya selects YouLend (January 2026)
- Trustpilot, YouLend
- Outfund, UK homepage (range, criteria, equity taken 0%)
- Outfund, funding page (offer builder: £150,000 over 9 months at 6.8%; wallet and card)
- Outfund, FAQs (£10,000 to £500,000; six months trading; terms of 3 to 12 months; soft credit check)
- Outfund, about page
- Outfund, partners page (approved funding £10k to £500k in under 3 days)
- Outfund, terms of use (last updated June 2026)
- Outfund homepage as at 19 July 2025 (Internet Archive: £25k to £10M, 12 months, £25k a month)
- Companies House, MTL Financial Ltd 10923992 (officers, filing history, strike-off notices, group accounts to 31 January 2025)
- FCA, EMD agents file (MTL Financial FRN 902840; data as at 6 September 2026)
- Trustpilot, Outfund
- TechCrunch, Outfund £37m round (8 December 2020)
- Finextra, Outfund £115m Series A (2022)
- Silicon Republic, Clearco exits UK and Ireland and refers clients to Outfund (August 2022)
- Wayflyer, “compare YouLend” page (cited only as a competitor characterisation)
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Important information
CapExpand Ltd (FRN 1060885) is an Appointed Representative of White Rose Finance Group Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 630772). We are a credit broker, not a lender, and we do not provide financial, tax or legal advice. We work with a panel of lenders whose particulars are available on request. If a deal completes the lender pays us a commission, at no cost to you; different lenders pay different amounts under different models, and we will tell you the amount for your deal on request. All lending is subject to status, valuation where applicable and the lender's own checks.
Registered office: Pure Offices, Lake View Drive, Annesley, Nottingham, NG15 0DT. Company No. 14433858.