Octopus Ventures supports Carebase with £5.8 million ​

 

Octopus Ventures has agreed to provide up to £5.8 million of finance to help Carebase develop a new elderly care home in Colchester.  Carebase is an independent group of private care homes offering high quality residential, nursing and dementia care services. 

Alnur Dhanani, owner and executive Chairman of Carebase comments:  "We are focussed on delivering the best possible quality of care which draws on our extensive industry experience.  We pride ourselves on ensuring that our homes incorporate the latest thinking for delivery of dementia care.  The investment from Octopus helps us accelerate our existing pipeline of developments. Put simply, the type of finance package Octopus developed is unique in the debt marketplace, and suited us as we did not want to go down the more typical equity investor route. Octopus is the only mezzanine finance provider at this end of the market that could deliver this type of structure."

Octopus Ventures specialises in working with entrepreneurs to provide funding solutions and is actively looking to invest between £500k and £6 million in companies across the whole risk spectrum, from early stage to buy out. 

Matt Setchell, Investment Manager, Octopus Ventures, said: "The flexible debt investment in Carebase represents an excellent fit for our lower risk venture capital trust funds ("VCTs") given its strong management team and impressive track record for project delivery.  Our funds invest in private UK companies, taking lower risk positions than typical VCTs. In most cases we achieve this by investing as the main or secondary lender in companies where there is good visibility on cash flows, whether through recurring or contracted revenues. 

"However, what we liked about the deal with Carebase was the opportunity to introduce an asset backed structure into our portfolio, within a sector that has attractive characteristics for our funding. It is also a good example of where our interest-only flexible debt can bring something different to companies looking to raise up to £6 million, where owners are not ready to give up equity but require more debt and flexibility than banks are currently willing to provide."