Investments
Gigaclear secures additional £6.5m to accelerate rollout of Gigabit rural broadband
February 2015
Gigaclear (the “Company”), the provider of ultrafast fibre-to-the-premises networks to rural communities, is pleased to announce the successful completion of a new round of equity financing.
£6.5m in new funds have been raised from both existing and new institutional and private shareholders with the CF Woodford Equity Income Fund, managed by high-profile fund manager Neil Woodford, adding to its initial investment from July 2014 and Forward Private Equity becoming the Company’s second institutional shareholder.
Focused on bringing high-quality, dependable broadband connectivity to the UK’s rural population and offering customers symmetric speeds of up to 1Gbps (1000Mbps) today, Gigaclear now has a pipeline of several hundred rural communities looking for ultrafast and reliable broadband. The Company currently owns and operates 17 rural fibre networks across Oxfordshire, Kent and Rutland, and has 20 under construction across Oxfordshire, Kent, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.
Today’s £6.5 million in new equity funding has been secured from both existing and new private and institutional shareholders, with the CF Woodford Equity Income Fund adding to its previous £5.0 million investment from July 2014, and Forward Private Equity becoming Gigaclear’s second institutional shareholder. Following this new round of funding, the Company now has over 100 private and institutional shareholders. This additional investment will allow Gigaclear to continue to expand its footprint and bring ultrafast broadband to thousands of customers in rural areas.
“The staff, management, Directors and shareholders of Gigaclear are determined to accelerate our delivery of ultrafast broadband. With strong support from existing and new shareholders, we will meet the record demand we are seeing for our transformational broadband. Rural communities across the UK realise that they can leapfrog a whole generation of technology with a new, ultrafast, pure fibre network that can scale to thousands of megabits per second, future proofing the communities for many many years and allowing them, even today, to reap benefits not yet available to many towns and cities in the UK. We are already putting this new investment to work, building new networks and serving thousands of homes and businesses.”
