Source: London-based buy now, pay later service Zilch adds $110M to its Series B, bringing the round to over $200M, from Goldman Sachs and Daily Mail's owner
Mark Kleinman / Sky News :
Context & Ripple Effects
Zilch is barely four months past its $80M Series B at a $500M+ valuation, and the round is now more than doubling to over $200M — with Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail's owner stepping in alongside the original investors.
The extension lands in the middle of a capital surge across buy now, pay later: weeks later, India's ZestMoney raised $50M from Australia's Zip, and by November Zilch itself had converted the momentum into a $2B valuation.
First-order effects
- Zilch's Series B grows from $80M to over $200M in a single quarter, giving the London BNPL firm a war chest while its valuation is still at the $500M level set in April.
- Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail's owner become direct BNPL investors, pulling a mainstream bank and a legacy publisher into a sector previously dominated by venture funds like Gauss Ventures.
Second-order effects
- Rival BNPL startups face a funding arms race: ZestMoney's $50M raise from Zip weeks later shows competitors matching capital raises to keep pace with Zilch's enlarged round.
- Non-traditional investors — investment banks and media groups — get a template for buying into consumer credit fintech at the Series B stage, ahead of the sector's re-rating.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to BNPL consolidating around heavily capitalized players: Zilch's later rounds — $2B by late 2021 and a $176.7M raise in 2025 at that same $2B valuation — suggest capital intensity rose faster than valuations after this 2021 surge.
- If mainstream institutions keep underwriting consumer-credit fintech directly, the line between venture-backed lenders and bank-funded credit books blurs, echoing Zopa's earlier move from P2P lending toward a banking license.
The trend: Buy now, pay later is shifting from venture-funded niche to a sector where banks and institutional capital set the pace of consolidation.