Arianee was founded in early 2017 to create a universal library of valuable objects by leveraging blockchain technology. Tokenizing assets of value on a public blockchain opens up a vast range of potential decentralized applications to layer on top of the core protocol to supplement Arianee’s baseline functions.

These applications include potential mechanisms such as product messaging, fractional ownership, secure peer-to-peer marketplaces, and a global lost and found directory. However, Arianee needs capital investment in order to build these additional functions and scale accordingly.

The need for investment presents its own challenges, as raising funds through selling equity to venture capitalists or other traditional funding methods is not possible for a project such as Arianee because no VC firm would agree to invest in a company that develops open-source code and does not retain complete control over its product.

The Arianee platform is decentralized by design, however, as not many product owners would be willing to share such sensitive information with a company that maintains absolute control of the platform.

In addition, a decentralized solution is clearly what brands and application developers need. During our meetings, we learned that negative experiences with large centralized platforms in the past have left them suspicious of the concept and in search of alternative solutions.

Blockchain technology presented us with an innovative option for raising the funds we needed for project development without jeopardizing the future independence of the network. Furthermore, a native network token would serve a very important function on the platform itself, so we decided that a token offering was our best option.

The token crowdsale model is not perfect — controversy and mixed reactions surround the core structure. Failed ICO projects have left a bitter taste in some investor’s mouths.

However, we believe that the Token Offering model coincides with our interests, as a distributed governance amongst our key success factors. That said, we believe there needs to be a few adjustments. We are stripping out the flaws of the conventional ICO model and implementing staggered rounds tied to development milestones.

Start with the user

When we began building Arianee, we knew that we were not the only ones working on a project of this nature. However, in a sector run by the “if you build it, they will come” mindset, we decided to focus on putting our solution in front of future users before launching development.

This became tougher over time as we watched many projects over the last year or so raise huge amounts of capital based on nothing but a concept. Still, with the entrepreneurial experience of our team (Overblog, Teads, Vestiaire Collective), we were able to resist the urge to cash in early, and remained focused on the long-term growth of Arianee.

The first step was to formulate a go-to market strategy. We elected to focus on personal luxury goods for both technical and logistical reasons, as members of our team have a formidable expertise of the luxury industry with decades of experience (Tiffany & Co., Omega).

We have since met with executives from over 50 renowned luxury brands, which has allowed us to align with the interests of all the stakeholders that would use our protocol.

Raise enough to build a working minimum viable product

We built our prototype during the ICO boom, when numerous projects raised millions of dollars with just a White Paper. Arianee’s founders maintained their course and focused on the foundation of the project. We were convinced that in the long-term, solid projects focused on delivering value to all stakeholders would outperform others both in usage and financial valuation.

Therefore, the founding team collectively invested $1 million to begin development. To stretch our limited budget as far as possible, we focused on the most important baseline features of the Arianee protocol.

At this early stage, limited resources ensured our focus on fundamentals, not fluff. On the technical side, we decided the most important component would be a functional prototype that could bring Arianee to life. Consequently, on the business side, we focused on brand outreach and market feasibility analysis.

Without the functional demo, we would not have been able to convince some of the most prestigious brands in the luxury industry to kickstart three more pilot projects. We are looking forward to announcing these partnerships in the coming weeks.

Now that we have laid a solid foundation, completing these pilot projects while maintaining our brand outreach required more than just our initial seed funding.

Private rounds to build critical mass of usage at launch

Pilot projects are an intricate undertaking, especially when working with a young technology such as blockchain. However, they are absolutely necessary to drive real usage on the platform. We therefore raised a second round of financing — $3 million in a private pre-sale over the summer from strategic partners — to fund these projects.

Although our technical team will be working on these pilots, our business development team cannot slow down on our brand onboarding, no matter how prestigious the brands we’ve already come to agreements with are. We will also continue integrating our work with ERP and CRM solutions — a crucial aspect for business adoption, as new tools need to integrate with existing solutions if they are to become mainstream.

We are also aware of the need to begin working on expanding the usage of the protocol beyond brands to developers and third-party service providers such as marketplaces and enterprise software solution providers. Developing the secondary functions allows service providers to build applications leveraging the Arianee protocol. To fund this next stage of development, we will launch a pre-sale round in October with the target cap of $5 million.

Scaling the ecosystem

We expect the public round of the token offering to take place right before the public launch of the main-net in April 2019. This sale needs to be close to the final release so that participants can use the tokens as soon as possible.

Arianee’s mission extends far beyond what the team is planning. That’s on purpose. We require a passionate community of developers and entrepreneurs to build services on top of the Arianee platform. That’s why the capital raised through the public sale will be used to fund promising third-party projects for the platform.

A summary of our token sale rounds with associated objectives: