Mon 13th Mar 2017 - Curious Restaurants embarks on £600,000 crowdfunding campaign to launch Jones Family Kitchen concept Curious Restaurants embarks on £600,000 crowdfunding campaign to launch Jones Family Kitchen concept: Curious Restaurants, which operates The Jones Family Project in Shoreditch, east London, has launched a £600,000 fund-raise on crowdfunding platform Crowdcube to open its first two Jones Family Kitchen sites and roll-out the concept. The company, founded by Duncan Watts and Amit Joshi, is offering a 19.35% equity stake in return for the investment. Watts and Joshi have worked together for 20 years and built up and sold a number of businesses in the restaurant and bar sector in that time. Watts qualified as a chartered accountant before becoming a investor/director of Pitcher and Piano, which he sold to Marston’s in 2011 for a multiple of 25 times earnings. He went on to create Rocket Restaurants with Joshi, which they sold to sector investor Luke Johnson in 2011. The pitch states: “We are about to enter the next stage of our business life by building the first two Jones Family Kitchens. These restaurants will be smaller, more accessible siblings to the flagship Jones Family Project. We opened in Shoreditch in late 2013 and are now fully established as part of the premium London restaurant scene. Turnover has grown to exceed £1.4m in FY16. Comparing the financial performance in the second half of 2016 to 2015, we have grown at a like-for-like rate of some 20%. The flagship restaurant became profitable at the end of last year and is situated in probably the most exciting area of London in terms of development over the next five years. Our aim is to establish the Jones Family Kitchen at the upper end of premium casual dining and grow a business across the UK. We are raising equity to help fund these two new restaurants as well as to strengthen our head office team to enable us to roll-out this new restaurant concept. The Jones Family Kitchen model is based on a smaller 80 to 100 seats with a single bar. We believe that this is a more replicable model and easier to roll-out across the country. Our business plan involves us building two of these new sites each year for the next three or four years. They will be in London and in regional larger towns and cities. The founders believe that this is a sensible target that will allow the business to develop at a sustainable pace. This round of fund-raising should allow us to build the first two sites when matched by appropriate bank debt. The company will need to raise further equity in the future.” The company expects Ebitda to be -£50,036 in June this year, -£112,524 in June 2018 and £121,345 in June 2019. It expects sales to increase from £1,766,000 in June this year to £6,282,500 in June 2019.