Tusker

Headquartered: Watford, United Kingdom

Investment date: 2015

Exit date: 2023

Financial Services HR & Edtech

https://www.tuskerdirect.com/

At a Glance

1300000+

Employees with access to tusker's cars

75%+

future car fleet is electric

6.4x

return on exit

How we helped

Tusker is a market-leading UK-based vehicle management and leasing company that provides Electric Vehicles (EV) and Ultra-Low Emission Vehicles (ULEV) via salary sacrifice schemes.

Tusker are experts in salary sacrifice cars having launched the UK’s first car benefit scheme in 2008. Their salary sacrifice customers are from the length and breadth of the UK and range from SMEs to large public and private sector customers. Tusker’s commitment to salary sacrifice and low-emission vehicles has seen them grow their customer base tenfold since 2012.

People & culture:

We led further investment into the management team to support future growth plans, including recruiting the new roles of CMO and CTO, as well as PE chairman, Richard Prosser.

Sales & marketing:

During our investment, Tusker has increasingly focussed on its green positioning, and we have supported the team in joining the EV100 pledge, to deliver net-zero emissions for its fleet and to work towards a completely electric fleet by 2030.

In 2023, Tusker was acquired by Lloyds Banking Group for a value of c.£300m.

Following deferred consideration in January 2026, the return on exit is now 6.4x.

It really felt from the outset like a partnership. They have this really good balance of support and challenge, and that’s with everyone that you meet at ECI. From the people that support the business with partnering, right up to board level.’

Paul Gilshan

CEO, Tusker

The Tusker growth story

Tusker is the leading business-to-business provider of cars for employees through salary sacrifice schemes.

Both Tusker and ECI were really aligned and that made for a really great working partnership. They had this really good balance of support and challenge and that’s with everyone that you meet at ECI and for the people that support the business with partnering right up to board level.

A key area of focus for us was to ensure that Tusker was well positioned to benefit from the trend, the very strong trend of the move to electric vehicles. When we first invested in Tusker, they were taking almost no orders for electric vehicles every month. And when we sold, the majority, the vast majority of orders were for electric vehicles.

That’s a huge shift in a relatively short space of time. And what that meant was when there was a market-wide uptake of electric and hybrid vehicles, Tusker was in a really good place to capture that market share and they did.

In fact, now we are carbon negative as we offset more emissions than we put on and we also offset the emissions for the charging points that our drivers use. It’s not something that I see as like a bolt-on to the business. It’s integral to what we do when you’re running an electric fleet. So it’s core to our business and working with ECI, they’ve always been really supportive of the plan to become fully electric by 2030.

Another critical success factor for us was heavy investment in Tusker’s employees, especially in C-suite positions in marketing, technology and people, as well as a consumer-focused chair. And this was important because we wanted sustainable growth and we wanted a sustainable proposition where people would join us, people would grow with us and people would help us achieve our ambitions.

And that management team is still with us today and they’ve been pivotal to the growth that we’ve seen in the business.

We’re delighted that our investment in Tusker returned 6.2 times money for ECI’s investors and a fantastic result for the management team with which we partnered. The support that they gave us at board level during that time and helping us make the right decisions for the business was second to none.