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The funding will be used to help encourage take-up of the company’s fibre services
UK altnet Community Fibre has raised £125 million from a consortium of lenders including JP Morgan, Alpha Bank, Barclays, Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), and Sequoia, in its latest funding round.
The funds, the company says, will primarily be used to help connect customers within their existing footprint, as well as expanding their network coverage.
“Community Fibre has been and will continue to be highly focussed on delivering the best customer experience and the best value for money in the market. Our success here, growing from just 10k customers at the start of 2020 to over 310k in less than 5 years, has driven a strong lender appetite. We and our financial backers are aligned on driving acquisition growth and confident in overachieving our penetration targets,” said Graeme Oxby, Community Fibre’s CEO.
“The lenders and our shareholders share the view that Community Fibre’s momentum will further strengthen its position as the best and largest full fibre only provider in London and is a vote of confidence in its strong management team and their ability to commercialise the large London network,” echoed Olaf Swantee, the company’s chairman.
In total, Community Fibre has raised £1.1 billion since its inception in 2013, according to a Telegraph report.
As of November last year, Community Fibre had passed 1.3 million homes across and around London.
Its last large funding round, back in 2022, had secured a new finance facility worth £985 million, aimed at helping the company to expand its FTTP rollout to 2.2 million by the end of 2024.
By late 2023, however, the company announced its intention to temporarily pause its network build, cutting jobs and shifting its focus to “deliver a stronger return to our investors by focusing even more on our already successful marketing and sales activities.”
Indeed, this rollout deceleration was already prominent in the company’s 2023 financial results, which noted that residential premises passed totaled around 1.3 million.
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