London-based buy now pay later startup Zilch raises $110M at a $2B valuation led by Ventura Capital; Zilch was last valued at $500M in April
- London-based start-up Zilch has raised $110 million in a round of funding that values it at $2 billion, four times the $500 million it was worth eight months ago.
Context & Ripple Effects
Zilch's re-rating has been unusually fast even by 2021 standards: an $80M Series B at a $500M+ valuation in April, then a Series B extension adding another $110M from Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail's owner in July, and now this $110M round led by Ventura Capital that quadruples the price in eight months.
The deal lands mid-wave for London fintech — payments firm Zepz raised $292M at a $5B valuation in August and neobank Zopa hit unicorn status with a $300M Vision Fund-led round just weeks ago — making Zilch one of the fastest-rising UK consumer-finance names of the year.
First-order effects
- Zilch exits 2021 with well over $300M raised across the year and a $2B mark, giving it balance-sheet firepower to fund receivables and compete on pricing against larger BNPL incumbents.
- Ventura Capital takes the lead position on a four-times-up round, while earlier backers from the April and July tranches see paper gains inside a single year.
Second-order effects
- Institutional names like Goldman Sachs already buying into BNPL paper lowers the cost of capital across the sector, pressuring every consumer-credit startup's funding terms upward — and pushing London rivals like Zepz and Zopa to defend their own marks with comparable rounds.
- A $2B valuation on a company valued at $500M in April sets a local benchmark that other UK fintech founders will anchor their own raises against.
Third-order effects
- Later coverage shows the pattern's limit: Zilch's 2025 raise led by KKCG came in at the same $2B valuation, meaning the 2021 spike marked a ceiling rather than a floor — a template for how BNPL marks inflated during the cheap-money window and then went sideways once rates turned.
- If flat follow-on rounds become the norm for 2021's cohort, the sector shifts from valuation competition to unit-economics competition, with lenders who funded growth cheaply forced to prove repayment quality instead.
The trend: Zilch's eight-month quadrupling is a data point in the 2021 London fintech funding surge whose peak valuations — as its own later flat round shows — became the high-water line before the sector repriced.