OakNorth – the bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs – has completed a funding deal worth £19m with LEON, the fast food brand that was launched in 2004 and now has 37 stores across the UK.
In the last two years LEON has doubled its number of stores and increased some store sales by up to 50 per cent. Last month LEON opened its first overseas store in Amsterdam, the success of which has encouraged the brand to open a second Amsterdam site in February of 2017. LEON will use this new money from OakNorth to open another 50 sites within the next four years, employing an additional 1,000 people.
Commenting on the deal, John Vincent, CEO and co-founder of LEON, said: “We are so happy that people across the country ask us to bring LEON to their towns and cities, and that we have seven hundred young people working with us who want to grow and progress. This significant amount of money makes it possible for us to achieve both these things, and takes us a step closer to achieving our aim of making it easy for everyone to eat and live well.
“LEON set out to revolutionise fast food. Rishi and Joel at OakNorth are doing the same for banking. Antony, the LEON CFO, and I have found them incredibly good to deal with – they have a similarly positive, entrepreneurial, can-do attitude to business as we do at LEON.”
Unlike many traditional lenders that are currently retrenching from the market since the Brexit vote, OakNorth – which offers business loans – is using it as an opportunity to increase its lending efforts and gain market share from larger rivals.
Rishi Khosla, co-founder and chief executive of OakNorth Bank, commented: “When we launched less than a year ago, we did so with the intention of shaking up the UK lending market and challenging the status quo. We wanted to offer the country’s entrepreneurs a banking experience that was dramatically different to that which my business partner and I had encountered as entrepreneurs trying to secure growth capital for our previous venture. We’re therefore delighted to be supporting LEON in its next phase of growth – an ambitious and entrepreneurial business.”