Netomnia and YouFibre secure £123 million funding to roll out full-fibre broadband across the UK

Nov 15, 2021

Netomnia, the UK’s fastest-growing wholesale fibre broadband operator, and service provider YouFibre, have successfully secured £123 million of funding to support their national rollout of ultrafast full fibre broadband.

Netomnia was founded in 2019 by Jeremy Chelot, former CEO of Community Fibre, and has ambitious plans to reach one million premises by 2023. The company has already reached over 75,000 premises passed, having commenced rollout in 2020. Netomnia is on track to build more than 100,000 premises and YouFibre to acquire more than 5,000 customers by the end of 2021.

The funds raised include £20 million from ESO Capital Partners UK LLP, the provider of flexible capital solutions to European SMEs; and £25 million from AdvenCap, which focuses on businesses that can scale and make a positive impact on the world by solving important problems. A further £73 million in debt has been provided by Avenue Capital Group, a global investment firm, with the remaining £5 million from the founders.

Netomnia and YouFibre have an experienced management team with a strong track record in broadband. Chief Financial Officer Will Wadsworth was previously with rural broadband provider Gigaclear and Chairman Callum Dick was formerly the founder of Community Fibre.

Following strong growth momentum over the past 18 months, Netomnia has set out to establish itself as a national full fibre infrastructure operator and is building out a robust, reliable network with industry leading technology, bringing a multi-gigabit-ready network UK wide, having recently started building across Scotland and Wales. Working in partnership with major UK construction companies, it has a lean and scalable operating model that enables it to achieve swift deployment.

Netomnia’s infrastructure supports symmetrical (equal upload and download speeds) multi-gigabit services up to 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps) using XGS-PON technology; this means ISPs using Netomnia’s network will be able to offer their customers reliable ultrafast speeds for decades to come.

Jeremy Chelot, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Netomnia commented: “We are very excited to welcome our new investors on board. This funding will support our strategy to roll our network out faster and across more areas, marking another step towards becoming the third national full fibre network operator in the UK. We are scaling rapidly, as we rise to the challenge of providing the future-proof multi-gigabit connectivity which will aid the economic and social development of towns and cities across the country for generations to come.”

Jon Ford, Senior Portfolio Manager of Avenue Europe, said: “We’re delighted to be supporting Netomnia’s broadband infrastructure rollout. We have been impressed by the company’s experienced management team, their track record of delivery and strong industry relationships. We look forward to working with them over the coming years.”