Tide CEO Oliver Prill on reaching 2 million SME customers and funding global expansion

London-based fintech Tide has quietly grown into one of Europe’s largest SME-focused financial platforms, recently surpassing two million business customers and securing a $1.5 billion valuation. Chief executive Oliver Prill, who joined the then‑tiny startup in 2018, is now steering the company through rapid international growth while stressing financial discipline and a pragmatic approach to regulation.

With a structurally profitable UK business helping to fund newer operations in Europe and India, Tide is positioning itself as a long-term player in the SME finance market rather than chasing a quick stock market listing or hype‑driven milestones.

From 30-person startup to fintech unicorn

Tide launched in 2017 and initially operated as a small, early-stage startup backed by seed investors including Passion Capital. When Prill came on board in 2018, the company had roughly 30 employees and a product that showed early promise but still needed to be scaled.

Drawing on his background in financial services and SME banking, Prill was brought in to turn those early “proof points” into a scalable business. Under his leadership, Tide has grown from that small team to more than 2,800 employees and recently crossed the threshold of two million business customers, or “members”, less than a decade after launch.

Prill views the customer milestone less as a vanity metric and more as evidence that the company has genuine product–market fit and sustainable unit economics. The rapid expansion has been underpinned by a clear focus on the underserved SME segment rather than retail banking.

What Tide offers small businesses

Tide describes itself as a business financial platform serving small and medium-sized enterprises, freelancers, and sole traders. Rather than operating as a fully licensed bank, Tide is an e-money institution that provides business current accounts in partnership with ClearBank, which holds the banking licence.

On top of day-to-day banking services, Tide has built a suite of tools designed to simplify financial administration for smaller firms. These include:

• Business current accounts with integrated payments
• Access to credit and business loans
• Expense management features
• Invoicing and basic accounting tools
• Recently added insurance products for business customers

The company generates revenue through subscription plans and paid business tools, interest on deposits, interchange and transaction fees, and income from lending and insurance products.

A profitable UK core and regulatory headwinds

The UK remains Tide’s core market and accounts for the vast majority of its revenue. The company now serves around 900,000 customers in Britain, representing roughly 15% of the UK’s small business market, and has helped its members secure more than £1.75 billion in credit.

According to Prill, the UK operation is “structurally profitable”, allowing Tide to reinvest domestic earnings into newer international markets. Tide Holdings reported revenues of £190 million in 2024, alongside a loss of £26 million at group level, reflecting this expansion strategy.

Growth in the UK has not been without challenges. One of the biggest has been the tightening of rules around Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, which require payment providers to reimburse customers who fall victim to such scams. Prill says Tide has had to divert significant investment into fraud-prevention technology to comply with the regime, and he questions how effective the rules have been at reducing fraud volumes across the market.

He also points to the sluggish performance of the wider UK economy as a major headwind, putting additional strain on Tide’s core customer base of small and medium-sized businesses.

Expanding across Europe and into India

Unlike many British fintechs that have prioritised expansion into the United States, Tide has taken a different route. The company is active in the UK, Germany, France and India, with the UK business currently subsidising the build-out of these newer markets.

Tide is still at an early stage in continental Europe, where operations in Germany and France are described as being at the start of their journey. In both countries, SMEs form the backbone of the economy, and Prill believes the digitisation of financial services lags the UK by several years, leaving considerable room for growth.

India, however, has quickly become Tide’s largest market by customer count. The company initially entered the country by setting up a technology and engineering hub in Hyderabad after Brexit, as it searched for tech talent. That presence gave Tide deeper insight into the local market and led to a full commercial launch.

Tide now serves around 1.1 million customers in India, a small share of a vast market with an estimated 120 million SMEs. Despite that modest penetration, the scale opportunity is significant. Prill highlights how government-led initiatives such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have made India’s digital payments infrastructure, in some respects, more advanced than what is currently available in much of Europe.

He notes that in India, the company’s biggest rival is still cash, underscoring the size of the digitalisation opportunity. Prill, who travels to India at least twice a year for extended visits, emphasises the importance of building personal relationships and maintaining strong ties with local stakeholders and government representatives.

Funding, secondary sales and unicorn status

In 2025, Tide raised $120 million at a valuation of approximately $1.5 billion in a round led by US private equity firm TPG, alongside existing investor Apax Digital Funds. The deal pushed Tide into “unicorn” territory, at a time when UK policymakers have been pushing to keep more late-stage tech financing at home through initiatives such as the Mansion House reforms.

For Tide, the priority of the round was not simply raising fresh capital for operations. Prill says a key goal was to provide liquidity for early backers and employees, enabling angel investors and some staff to sell shares in secondary transactions. The company also wanted to broaden its shareholder base with additional late-stage investors, complementing Apax’s earlier involvement with TPG as a second large institutional backer.

Prill plays down the personal importance of the unicorn label, even if the valuation milestone is meaningful for many stakeholders and serves as external validation of Tide’s progress.

No rush to go public

Despite its size and valuation, Tide is not positioning itself for an imminent stock market listing. Prill is clear that an IPO is not on the near-term agenda, with management instead focused on scaling the business further in existing markets and embedding new technologies.

Artificial intelligence is a major part of that strategy. Tide is already using AI extensively behind the scenes in areas such as product engineering and internal processes. A customer-facing AI product is also in development and expected to launch soon. Prill acknowledges that Tide may be less vocal about AI than some peers but says the technology is becoming a core enabler of the company’s operations and future growth plans.

Leadership style and the next phase for Tide

Prill, who studied economics at UCL and later completed a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, describes himself as a structured, strategic leader who focuses on organising teams and removing obstacles to execution. He is candid about his own weaknesses, citing impatience and a sometimes brusque communication style.

After eight years as CEO, he says the role has changed significantly. In Tide’s early days he was deeply involved in operational details; now, much of his time is spent on major strategic decisions and resolving bottlenecks as the organisation grows in scale and complexity.

What has remained constant, according to Prill, is that Tide feels like a different company every year, with new challenges and opportunities emerging as it adds products, enters new markets and adapts to regulatory shifts. For him, that continual evolution is part of the attraction of leading a fast-growing fintech that aims to be a long-term partner for small businesses around the world.