Grain Secures £225m Funding to Accelerate UK Full Fibre Broadband Rollout

Network operator and ISP Grain (Grain Connect) has this afternoon announced that they’ve secured a £225m funding boost (mostly debt and some equity), which will enable them to expand the reach of their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover c.600,000 UK premises. This is said to be the “next step” on the road to 1 million premises.

The operator’s broadband network currently covers over 250,000 premises (RFS) across the United Kingdom and is home to 43,000 customers (data from the end of March 2025), which is up from 220,000 premises and 30,000 customers in May 2024. But despite the wider market pressures that have caused other alternative networks to stall, Grain has so far managed to continue their build and today’s agreement will accelerate that.

The new funding reflects a £212.5m debt facility with funds and/or accounts managed, advised or controlled by HPS Investment Partners, LLC or its subsidiaries. On top of that, Equitix is also investing an additional £13m of equity into the business – the fifth time that they have invested in the operator.

Grain currently has significant coverage in areas including the North East, North West and the Midlands (England), which will now be expanded upon. The altnet also continues to commit to never installing telegraph poles in their network, preferring instead to either go underground or to run new fibre via Openreach’s existing infrastructure.

Richard Cameron, CEO of Grain, said:

“We are very pleased to partner with HPS, a partnership which demonstrates the strength of the advantages we have over the whole market and the strong financial performance we have delivered to date.

External benchmarking shows that the next most efficient provider to build and connect homes spends 47% more than Grain and our operating cost per customer is 60% lower than the market.”

The announcement, which follows hot on the heels of CityFibre securing a significant funding boost worth £2.3bn (here), appears to mark a positive turn in the industry for at least some of the sector’s embattled altnets. But the catch is that any funding deal signed today will almost certainly be subject to less favourable conditions than they had before (e.g. interest payments will be higher). In addition, today’s announcement doesn’t say when they expect to reach either 600k premises or 1 million.

The other question mark is over how Grain will approach and define the “next stage in their growth journey“. In this market, that could just as easily see them going on the consolidation hunt as it could drive their own build engine to reach more premises via more digging, or possibly a combination of the two. But the announcement makes no mention of consolidation, so the focus for now seems to be on new builds.

Grain was advised by CMS and Lazard.