London-based Fly Now Pay Later, which provides flexible financing for travelers, raises £35M Series A led by Revenio Capital
Annie Musgrove / Tech.eu :
Context & Ripple Effects
The raise lands in a London cluster of checkout-finance deals: Divido's lender marketplace pulled in a Series B backed by HSBC and ING, and Tymit raised from Frasers Group to push merchant installments, both betting that financing happens at payment time rather than through card issuers.
Travel is emerging as its own slice of that market — Leavy.co's seed round funded upfront payments for rented rooms — and Fly Now Pay Later's £35M from Revenio Capital makes the strongest-capitalized play yet on deferring the cost of the trip itself.
First-order effects
- With £35M behind it, Fly Now Pay Later can underwrite more traveler bookings directly, positioning itself between consumers and card issuers at the moment of purchase.
- Revenio Capital gains a lead position in a travel-financing niche where the closest funded comparators are still generalists like Divido and Tymit.
Second-order effects
- Generalist checkout financiers face a specialist rival: Divido's multi-lender marketplace and Tymit's merchant installment program must either add travel-specific risk pricing or cede the vertical.
- Airlines, hotels, and online travel agents get a non-card deferred-payment option, weakening the default position of card networks in travel checkout.
Third-order effects
- If vertical specialists keep attracting dedicated rounds, buy-now-pay-later fragments into sector-by-sector lenders that own their own risk data — and consumer-credit regulators inherit a financing layer embedded invisibly inside travel booking flows.
The trend: Consumer lending is specializing by vertical, with travel joining retail checkout as a segment where dedicated pay-later providers raise their own capital.