Investor puts £7.5m into Pure Cremation expansion

UK SPECIALIST Pure Cremation has attracted £7.5m in funding from Puma Investments amid hopes that a growing trend for simpler cremation services will open the door for a stock market flotation or US buy-out.

Eliot Kaye, an investment director at Puma, said that his firm was putting money behind what he hopes is a “winning combination” of an experienced management team with a “very disruptive business model within a very established market”.

Pure Cremation – founded in 2015 by Bryan and Catherine Powell – specialises in what is referred to as direct cremation, which involves the company collecting and caring for the deceased, who are then cremated without a service or mourners present.

Ashes are returned to the family within weeks.

Mr Kaye said he had been impressed with the company’s traction over the last six months since it pumped the first £5m into Pure Cremation back in November.

Puma will put the remaining £2.5m into the business over the coming months, helping to open the company’s new-build crematorium in Andover which is now under construction and will begin serving direct cremation clients in October 2018.

It means Pure Cremation will no longer have to rely on crematorium sites owned by other businesses to deliver its services, which Mr Kaye says “will allow the business to scale significantly”.

“So as a growth capital investor it’s got all the ingredients that we would look for to get the best risk-adjusted return for our investors,” he added.

Pure Cremation said it served more than 1,000 families last year, and now accounts for about five per cent of all cremations in the UK.