Thayne Forbes

Thayne Forbes is an Investment Director at Epiris LLP, a London-based private equity firm that has invested more than £5 billion across 200-plus deals over ~25 years and targets upper-mid-market buyouts. He joined Epiris' investment team through its Associate Programme in 2020 (recorded as an LLP member from April 2020 at Companies House) and was promoted to Investment Director in June 2024 as part of a group of six promotions announced by the firm. He was born in August 1994 and is a British national.

Before Epiris, Forbes worked at OC&C Strategy Consultants, where he focused on commercial due diligence and strategy projects — a background that maps directly onto the diligence-heavy nature of mid-market buyout investing. He holds a degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

At Epiris he has worked on several of the firm's investments, including Pure Cremation, Delinian, Inchcape Shipping Services (ISS), Stuart Turner and Nucleus. He served as a director of the Pure Group acquisition vehicles (Pure Group Bidco Limited and Pure Group Holdco Limited) in 2023 and, per the Epiris team page, currently sits on the board of Pure. (Note: he is a different person from the similarly named Thayne Forbes who co-founded the brand-valuation consultancy Intangible Business — do not conflate the two.)

• Invests through Epiris's core strategy: taking control stakes in high-quality, upper-mid-market businesses, plus loan-to-own debt investments — Epiris describes its mission as "to build great businesses that deliver outstanding returns."
• Targets companies with £75m–£500m enterprise value, deploying roughly £40m–£150m of equity per deal — this is buyout capital, not seed/angel funding.
• Favours situations involving complexity — carve-outs from larger groups, corporate or bank disposals, and businesses with "broken processes" that can be fixed operationally.
• Sector-agnostic in practice, with his deal experience clustering around financial services (Nucleus), information/data services (Delinian), business & shipping services (ISS), industrials (Stuart Turner) and consumer/end-of-life services (Pure Cremation).
• Value is created through partnership with management teams and operational transformation rather than passive minority stakes.