Why we invested in Ninopay

The childcare affordability crisis hiding in plain sight

The numbers are stark. UK parents spend an average of 27% of their take-home pay on childcare, one of the highest proportions in the developed world. Seventy-four percent of UK parents report difficulty meeting childcare costs, the highest rate of any country. One in four have quit a job or dropped out of education to afford or to avoid this cost. These aren't edge cases. This is a mainstream experience of early parenthood in Britain.

And yet, the payment infrastructure serving the sector has barely changed in decades. There is no flexibility, no smoothing, no option to spread costs to when money is earned. The sector that shoulders the most financially stressful period in family life has never had a financial product built for it.

That's the gap Ninopay is closing.

Letting parents breathe without leaving nurseries out of pocket

Ninopay's model is elegant precisely because it solves two problems at once. Parents spread the cost of nursery fees across manageable monthly instalments, the way most other significant household costs are managed. Nurseries receive full payment upfront, immediately, without waiting or chasing. Ninopay sits in the middle, taking on the credit risk and the operational complexity, so neither side has to.

This isn't BNPL bolted onto childcare as an afterthought. It's a product designed from scratch for the specific financial dynamics of the early years sector: predictable, recurring, high-ticket costs, a provider base with real cash flow pressure, and a parent cohort that is not credit-poor but cash-flow-constrained.

The opportunity is substantial. The UK childcare market represents billions in annual spend, and the structural dynamics are compelling: the government's recent expansion of funded hours has brought more families into the system, increased provider capacity pressure, and created a growing population of parents managing complex childcare arrangements across multiple settings. As that population grows, so does the demand for payment flexibility.

Three founders who've built this before, in adjacent lanes

What convinced us most at Antler wasn't just the product thesis. It was the team.

James Symes (CEO) is a second-time founder with deep experience building consumer financial products at scale. He trained as a chartered accountant at KPMG and is ACA-qualified, which gives him a rare combination of financial rigour and commercial instinct. He then founded Bike Club, a subscription platform for children's bikes, growing it from a side project to a business with 70,000 members across the UK and Germany, raising over £60 million in the process. He knows what it takes to build a consumer brand that parents trust with recurring payments, and he knows the operational complexity of scaling a business where the customer relationship spans years. He remains a Non-Executive Director at Bike Club.

Timothy Davis (COO) has built and exited a BNPL business. He co-founded Butter, a UK-based buy now, pay later provider that grew to 100,000 customers before being acquired by Affirm, the world's largest BNPL platform. Tim brings direct experience in the precise mechanics Ninopay depends on: debt structuring, credit facilities, FCA regulation, and product design for financial products used by everyday consumers. Building a compliant, scalable consumer lending product is genuinely hard. Tim has done it once already.

Michael Jaszczuk (CTO) holds a Master's degree in Computer Science with a specialism in Intelligent Information Systems. He is building the infrastructure that makes the product work: the integrations with nursery management systems, the credit decisioning logic, the payment rails. In a business where reliability and trust are everything, the quality of the underlying technology is what earns the long-term relationships with providers.

Together, this team covers every dimension the business needs to succeed: a founder who has built a trusted consumer subscription product at scale, a founder who has built and sold a BNPL business, and a technical founder with the depth to execute.

Antler's investment thesis

We invested in Ninopay as part of the UK15 cohort in May 2026, and our conviction rests on a simple premise: the childcare sector is large, structurally stressed, and underserved by financial products.

The problem is real and acute and felt by millions of families every month. The business model is sound: transaction-based, with clear unit economics on both sides. And the team has the specific combination of experience the opportunity demands: consumer scale-up, BNPL execution, and technical depth.

What struck us during residency was the founders' clarity about what they were building and why. This isn't a team looking for a market to enter. They came in with lived experience of the problem, a working hypothesis about the solution, and backgrounds that map directly onto the execution risk. That specific combination of experience, applied to this specific problem, is founder-market fit in its most direct form.

Ninopay is currently in active fundraising, building provider partnerships, and focused on establishing the product in a market that is ready for it. We're glad to be backing them.