Vapoura Rum seeks £1.75m for expansion
English rum brand Vapoura is aiming to raise £1.75 million (US$2.3m) in private seed investment to support new hires, marketing and product development.
Founded by Olly Barkley and Ed Jackson in 2023, Vapoura is distilled, matured and bottled in England, at a facility in Cornwall. Barkley and Jackson created Vapoura after recognising a gap in the market for a super-premium English rum.
The funding will support Vapoura’s scale-up plans through 2027 and 2028, including team expansion, increased brand marketing, deeper on-trade penetration, and the brand’s first steps into export markets.
The UK remains the focus through 2026 and 2027, with export market testing planned from 2028.
Vapoura is hoping to secure the funds through a private seed round, rather than the typical crowdfunding route many brands take.
“Crowdfunding was something that we spoke about in the early stages but not something that we were pursuing for this round,” Barkley says.
Barkley outlines the broad allocation of the funds: approximately 30-40% toward team growth, 40-45% toward brand marketing, and 10-15% toward product development. The hiring focus will be on sales and brand marketing.
The Vapoura Rum range currently includes two products: the cocktail-forward Chapter One and Chapter Two, which is designed for sipping and stirred serves.
Chapter One is a Bourbon cask-aged spiced rum, bottled at 38% ABV and priced at £45 (US$60).
The second chapter in the range is a gold rum aged in Pedro Ximénez Sherry casks, which is said to be a rarity in the category. It is priced at £50 (US$67) and bottled at 42% ABV.
Vapoura has been focusing on the on-trade to drive its sales, with Barkley noting that bars and restaurants provide a “discovery channel” for consumers.
The brand has targeted premium hospitality venues, such as high-end cocktail bars and boutique hotels, within London and across the UK.
“We’ve managed to get into some internationally recognised groups and bars without chucking big listing fees purely on the provenance of liquid,” says Jackson, naming venues and groups such as The Mandrake, Dalesford, and Restaurant Story as examples.
“We really want to build a luxury brand here [in the UK], and doing that means you’ve got to be showing up in the right places,” Jackson adds.
The founders are long-time rum drinkers who created Vapoura during the Covid-19 lockdown. After studying the category’s history and provenance, they found that England lacked any super-premium rum brands made entirely on home soil.
“There wasn’t an abundance of super-premium rums that were made in England,” Barkley says. “We felt there was far more authenticity and transparency in being able to produce something from start to finish over here.”
Jackson stresses that the focus was on putting “quality first” and leading with passion, “not necessarily because there’s a gap in the market”.
Vapoura also achieved B Corp certification within its first year, scoring 91 points. It is one of the very few English rum brands to receive this accreditation, joining the likes of carbon-neutral producer Two Drifters in Devon.
Barkley says: “The days of just being a product and having a nice label and a good liquid, the days of cutting through with just that is not enough now.”
The founders noted that its production model reduces the environmental burden compared with many rum brands shipping finished liquid globally.
“We import our molasses, but that’s very different from importing massive amounts of liquid,” Jackson explains.
The brand has already laid down stock of Chapter Two for ageing, intended to evolve into the third expression from Vapoura, with the aim of releasing it in late 2027.
As for future expressions, Barkley says these will be intended for sipping. Beyond aged releases, Vapoura is also eyeing limited edition collaborations and single cask-style projects.
Regarding whether they had considered moving into the booming ready-to-drink (RTD) category, the founders reflect that they considered it in the early stages.
Jackson says that while they enjoy RTDs as consumers, launching them now could distract from building a luxury brand identity. “At this stage, it might confuse the messaging,” he adds.
They also hope to eventually create a physical brand home for Vapoura.
“A permanent bricks-and-mortar is a very pie-in-the-sky dream,” Barkley admits, “but it’s definitely something [that would be] beneficial and exciting.”
One of the biggest issues in rum is the lack of universal standards. Vapoura’s founders believe that for English rum to establish global credibility, clearer category definitions may eventually be needed.
“For us, fermentation, distillation, and everything should be done on UK soil to be called an English rum,” Jackson says.
But the founders also acknowledge that the lack of category-wide regulations for rum enables diversity, innovation and experimentation.
Jackson adds: “We want to be part of that journey in the English rum space and help grow credibility as a whole across the sector.”
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