London-based BNPL startup Hokodo raised a $40M Series B led by Notion Capital, following an £8.8M Series A in June 2021
Sophia Kunthara / Crunchbase News :
Context & Ripple Effects
Hokodo's $40M Series B lands in the middle of a London BNPL funding cluster: just five days earlier, fellow London BNPL service Playter closed $55M in equity and debt, and a year before that, checkout-financing marketplace Divido raised its own $30M Series B with HSBC and ING leading — bank money moving directly into the category.
What distinguishes Hokodo is the step-up pattern: an £8.8M Series A in June 2021 followed by a $40M round from Notion Capital roughly a year later, the kind of cadence that signals investors are underwriting B2B trade-credit financing as a scaling market rather than a consumer-lending side bet.
First-order effects
- Hokodo gains a war chest to scale its B2B buy-now-pay-later offering beyond what the £8.8M Series A supported, with Notion Capital now on the cap table as lead.
- Playter and Divido face a better-capitalized direct competitor in UK/European B2B checkout financing within the same week that Playter itself raised $55M.
Second-order effects
- Bank-led rounds like Divido's (HSBC, ING) versus VC-led rounds like Hokodo's (Notion Capital) set up two competing distribution models for B2B BNPL — lender-marketplace partnerships against startup-owned rails — forcing each camp to prove unit economics at scale.
- Fasanara Capital's appearance as a lead in both Playter's debt component and later Milan-based Qomodo's pre-seed shows specialist credit funds becoming repeat financiers of the BNPL stack, tightening supply of structured debt for the sector.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, B2B BNPL consolidates around players who can pair equity scale with debt facilities, squeezing out single-product startups and pushing embedded trade credit toward becoming default infrastructure at business checkout.
- London's grip on European BNPL deal flow — Hokodo, Playter, Divido all raising there — reinforces Dealroom's finding that the city has reclaimed Europe's top tech-hub position, concentrating follow-on capital for the next cohort.
The trend: European BNPL is pivoting from consumer checkout toward B2B trade credit, with London startups drawing progressively larger equity-plus-debt rounds to claim it.