Fund $34,627 a Minute: Square, Shopify, Enova & PayPal funding
- F.I. Editorial Team
- Jul 4
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 8
Block (Square Loans), Shopify (Shopify Capital), Enova (OnDeck and Headway Capital), and PayPal originated roughly $18.2 billion in small business loans and merchant cash advances in 2025. That's up 31% from the year before, and it doesn't even count Intuit's QuickBooks Capital, which is doubling year over year.
Break that down, and it comes out to about $34,600 in working capital hitting small business bank accounts every single minute. Watch it tick in real time:
The small business funding machine
That counter isn't a projection or a hype number. It's built from what these companies report in their own filings, shareholder letters, and earnings calls.
The platforms that process payments, host online stores, and run accounting software have quietly become some of the largest small business lenders in the country. They don't run branches. Most of them barely mention lending on their earnings calls. And they're growing fast:
Company | Product | 2024 volume | 2025 volume | Q1 2026 volume | Source |
Block / Square | Square Loans | $X | ~$7B | $X | filing / shareholder letter |
Shopify | Shopify Capital | ~$3B | ~$4.2B | ~$1.4B | filing / earnings |
Enova | OnDeck / Headway | $X | $X | $1.7B quarter | filing |
PayPal | Working Capital / Business Loans | $X | $X | $X | filing |
Square Loans funded about $7 billion to merchants in 2025, putting it at a scale that rivals or exceeds the annual small-business lending activity of many traditional institutions. Enova reported a record $1.7 billion in small-business originations in Q1 2026, driven by its SMB lending business, which includes OnDeck and Headway Capital. Shopify Capital went from roughly $3 billion in 2024 to $4.2 billion in 2025, and opened Q1 2026 at $1.4 billion, up from $821 million a year earlier. PayPal is the cautionary tale: once the top online SMB lender in the country, it tightened up, watched delinquencies climb past 10% of its book, replaced its CEO, and is now applying for a bank charter to reset.
The reason this machine works is the data. These platforms monitor a merchant's sales, deposits, and cash flow in real time, so they can approve in seconds and collect directly from the revenue stream, the same sales-based repayment model the MCA industry pioneered, now at tech-company scale.
Dig into the full quarter-by-quarter data yourself.
How we calculated the $34,627 per minute figure:
Funder Intel added reported 2025 small-business lending / merchant cash advance volume from Block/Square, Shopify Capital, Enova’s OnDeck and Headway Capital, and PayPal. The total came to roughly $18.2 billion. We divided that by 525,600 minutes in a year, resulting in approximately $34,627 per minute.
