Wayflyer: The Dublin Startup That Bet on Ecommerce Merchants When Banks Would Not

The problem that Wayflyer was built to solve is structural and persistent. An online merchant selling through Shopify or Amazon needs to buy inventory weeks or months before it generates revenue. Traditional banks, when they lend to small businesses at all, typically require collateral, trading history, and a credit assessment process that takes weeks. For a merchant who needs to place a purchase order in forty-eight hours to catch a seasonal window, that timeline is useless. Revenue-based financing — advancing capital against future sales, repaid as a percentage of daily revenue — had existed in various forms in the United States for years. In Europe, it was largely absent.

Aidan Corbett and Jack Pierse founded Wayflyer in Dublin in 2019, having identified the gap through Corbett's previous work in payments and analytics. The product was straightforward: connect your Shopify store, your advertising accounts, and your bank feeds; Wayflyer's algorithm assesses your revenue trajectory and offers you an advance, typically between €10,000 and several million euros, repaid as a fixed percentage of daily sales until the advance plus a flat fee is repaid. No equity dilution, no fixed monthly repayments, no personal guarantees.

The Pandemic Tailwind

Wayflyer launched in early 2020, weeks before the pandemic transformed the ecommerce landscape. The timing was, in retrospect, extraordinarily fortunate. Lockdowns drove a surge in online shopping that created a generation of new ecommerce merchants — people who had started selling online during the pandemic and were now growing faster than their working capital could support. Wayflyer's product was precisely what they needed, and the company grew rapidly through 2020 and 2021 on the back of that demand.

"We are not a lender in the traditional sense. We are a growth partner. Our returns are aligned with the merchant's success — if they don't sell, we don't get repaid."

— Aidan Corbett, co-founder of Wayflyer, in a 2021 interview with the Irish Times

The company raised a seed round in 2020 and a Series A shortly afterwards, with backing from investors including QED Investors and Left Lane Capital. The early rounds were modest — Wayflyer was not yet the scale-up it would later become — but they provided enough capital to build out the underwriting infrastructure and expand beyond Ireland into the UK and continental Europe. The company's underwriting model, which relies on real-time revenue data rather than historical credit scores, required significant investment in data infrastructure before it could operate reliably at scale.

The post-pandemic normalisation of ecommerce growth rates created a more challenging environment for Wayflyer and its competitors. The merchants who had grown explosively during lockdowns were now growing more slowly, and some were contracting. Default rates in revenue-based financing, which had been low during the boom, began to rise. Wayflyer, like other players in the space, had to tighten its underwriting criteria and manage its portfolio more actively.

What Wayflyer demonstrated, regardless of how its own story develops, is that the gap it identified was real. European ecommerce merchants were systematically underserved by traditional finance, and a product built around their specific cash flow dynamics — seasonal, volatile, data-rich — could find a market. The question for the next phase of the company is whether it can build a durable business in a more normalised environment, without the tailwind of a once-in-a-generation shift in consumer behaviour.