Puma Growth Partners: Navigating regulatory differences for Puma’s investment to fund Love Corn’s US growth

UK growth fund Puma Growth Partners targets high-growth small-and medium-sized enterprises across leading consumer brands, software and technology, and scalable business services. They focus on minority investments which typically average £4m to £10m. Puma Growth Partners is part of Puma Capital Group, which manages more than £1 billion in assets.

Our Corporate Partners David Coates and Andrew Clarke have worked with Puma since their earliest investments and have supported them in backing scale-up companies led by management teams with deep domain expertise and a clear vision for building successful, expertly run businesses.

We primarily advise Puma on its investment terms, leveraging the expertise of our Corporate, Commercial and Employment teams in particular, and we also help conduct due diligence on its prospective portfolio investee companies.

In early 2025, we advised Puma on its investment in Love Corn, a leading UK snack brand sold in over 20,000 stores across the UK and US. The business was founded by the McCloskey family in London in 2016 and launched into the US market in 2019.

Love Corn’s structure involves a US entity at the top of the structure, which added complexity to the deal. As such, we made a direct introduction to US law firm Fox Rothschild through our international network, who came on board as co-counsel.

“The key complexity on this deal was transplanting UK standard venture capital provisions onto a US company,” explains our Corporate Partner Ashwin Pillay. “We had to ensure that the UK framework required to obtain tax beneficial status in the UK also worked and was explainable from a US legal and regulatory perspective, when neither were designed to facilitate the other.”

The deal successfully completed in April 2025, and the Puma investment is expected to help Love Corn build brand awareness and accelerate further expansion in the UK and US markets.

We continue to provide counsel to Puma on several of its live investments as the company goes from strength to strength: it has expanded its presence in the last two years by opening offices in both Manchester and Edinburgh.

“As usual, it was great working with the Charles Russell Speechlys team,” says Mark Lyons, Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners. “Having worked with them on numerous deals over the years, their understanding of our team and strong track record acting on this type of deal continues to impress alongside their ability to co-counsel the investment with their US counterparts at Fox Rothschild.”

Mark Lyons, Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners

“Given the nature of Puma’s investments, the level of detail and recommendations required in our due diligence reports are very specific, so it’s important that we’re joined up internally. We seek to focus on having the same lead associates and partners working on these reports from our teams to ensure the consistency and quality of service provided.

It was our role to actively project manage and ensure that Puma was receiving the same service it would expect from Charles Russell Speechlys from another external counsel. This was made much easier by the fact that we have worked closely with Fox Rothschild a number of times before and know and trust the characters involved and vice versa.”

Ashwin Pillay, Partner