Glovo and PragmaGO have extended their embedded lending partnership to Poland, making PragmaCash financing available to the delivery platform’s network of local merchants from October 2026. Poland is the third market for the tie-up, following rollouts in Spain and Romania.
The product targets the small and independent businesses that make up a significant share of Glovo’s merchant base: restaurants, cafés, grocery stores, florists and pharmacies. Merchants can apply entirely online, receive a credit decision within minutes, and access financing of up to PLN 100,000 (approximately EUR 23,000), with funds transferred to their account within one business day. The financing carries no stated restriction on use, meaning it can cover stock purchases, seasonal staffing or any other operational need.
The commercial case
Joanna Budzik-Lister, VP strategic partnerships at PragmaGO, pointed to internal data as the backbone of the commercial argument. “Our data show that companies using this type of financing achieve year-on-year turnover that is 28% higher than companies that do not use it,” she said. The comparison is drawn from PragmaGO’s Merchant Cash Advance cohort, tracking the twelve months before and after a financing application.
Diana Hangartner, commercial director at Glovo Poland, framed the partnership as extending the platform’s existing value proposition beyond logistics. Running a local business now requires the capacity to act quickly on market opportunities, she said, and access to capital through the platform itself reduces friction for merchants already operating inside the Glovo ecosystem.
PragmaGO reported that nearly 24,000 entrepreneurs used its embedded lending product in 2025, drawing a combined PLN 872 million (approximately EUR 200 million) in financing across its markets. That figure represents a 66% year-on-year increase, though the release did not break down volume by country.
Market context
Embedded lending for gig-economy and delivery platform merchants has become a competitive category across Europe. The model is structurally attractive: a platform that processes a merchant’s transaction data already holds the most reliable proxy for repayment capacity, making underwriting faster and cheaper than a traditional bank loan application. Several other platform lenders and banking-as-a-service providers are pursuing the same merchant segments, including through partnerships with food-delivery and e-commerce marketplaces.
PragmaGO’s positioning is notable in that it is not a pure-play technology intermediary but a regulated financial institution with three decades of SME lending experience in Poland, operating since 1996. The group’s structure, which includes a Romanian digital factoring subsidiary, a Spanish embedded-finance unit and a Croatian operation, suggests a deliberate multi-market expansion model rather than an opportunistic single-deal play. That breadth of regulated experience may give it a compliance advantage as EU supervisors pay closer attention to the non-bank lending layer sitting inside consumer-facing platforms.
Poland’s SME financing market is large and historically underserved by retail banks for short-term working capital, which creates structural demand for faster, data-driven alternatives. The Glovo distribution channel gives PragmaGO a captive merchant population with verifiable revenue data, while Glovo gains a value-added service that deepens merchant retention without requiring it to hold a lending licence itself. The next test is whether transaction volumes in Poland match the trajectory seen in Spain and Romania, and whether the product can be scaled without a material rise in default rates as the borrower pool widens.
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