Wayflyer, Fortress Forward Flow: $1.5B for SMB Funding

Quick Take: Wayflyer announced a three-year forward-flow agreement under which funds managed by Fortress Investment Group affiliates will purchase up to $1.5 billion of assets originated on its platform, positioning the Dublin-based funder to deploy up to $4.5 billion to small businesses over the next 24 months.

Wayflyer announced the agreement Thursday morning. The structure: over three years, Fortress's asset-based finance funds will buy up to $1.5 billion of receivables originated through Wayflyer's platform, which funds consumer brands and e-commerce businesses with fast, non-dilutive working capital. The company, founded in 2020, with more than $6 billion deployed to thousands of brands since then, says the deal extends its total funding capacity enough to put up to $4.5 billion to work over the next two years.

CEO and co-founder Aidan Corbett called it "committed, reliable capital to put to work for our small business customers," and framed the structure as balance-sheet efficiency: originate, sell, recycle, repeat. Bart Stankiewicz, managing director in Fortress's asset-based finance group, described Wayflyer as "a scaled, data-driven origination channel" with a track record of strong credit performance.

Why the number matters, and why the structure matters more

Put $1.5 billion in context. The forward-flow deals we've covered this year, Parafin's $300 million with a New York asset manager, and before it Cross River's $360 million Parafin agreement, were significant. This is five times the size of the largest of them, and it comes from Fortress, a 27-year-old manager running $54 billion for roughly 2,000 institutional clients, whose asset-based finance team has spent two decades buying consumer and small commercial receivables. When that desk commits three years of purchasing to revenue-based e-commerce paper, it's pricing the asset class as a durable institutional allocation, not an experiment.

The structure is the other half of the story, and Corbett said the quiet part out loud: forward flow lets Wayflyer originate without warehousing, unlocking loan value upfront and recycling capital immediately. That's the compounding engine: every dollar originated comes back to originate again, so a $1.5 billion purchase commitment supports far more than $1.5 billion of lending. It's how a five-year-old company credibly talks about deploying $4.5 billion in 24 months.

Key Terms

• Forward flow: A standing commitment by an investor to purchase loans as they're originated. The originator sells paper continuously instead of holding it on a warehouse line.

• Asset-based finance (ABF): The private credit strategy of buying or lending against pools of receivables. Fortress's ABF team is one of the oldest in the space.

• Non-dilutive funding: Capital that doesn't take equity, Wayflyer's pitch to consumer brands that would otherwise raise venture money for inventory and marketing.

• Capital recycling: Selling originated loans to free up the same capital for new originations, the mechanism that multiplies a purchase commitment into deployment capacity.

The 2026 Wayflyer arc

Watch the sequence this year: a $250 million credit facility with ATLAS SP Partners in the first quarter; the acquisition of Conjura, an AI-driven e-commerce analytics platform, in June; and now a $1.5 billion forward flow in July. Facility, data, distribution, that's a company assembling all three legs of the modern funding platform at once, and it mirrors the maturation path we've documented across the industry all month. Corbett's own framing, "the sophistication of our capital structure grows with us", could be the caption on the entire July capital wave: Lendistry's warehouse, Forward's securitization, Northbase's private credit revolver, Parafin's forward flow, the Kapitus acquisition, and now this.

One pattern within the pattern: Fortress's ABF desk joins Oaktree's ABF strategy (which funded Northbase this month) on the list of major asset-based finance franchises now writing size in small business credit. The biggest allocators in private credit have found this industry's paper, and they keep coming back with bigger numbers.