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Arianee, the Paris-based Web3 platform for luxury and fashion, has raised €20 million in Series A funding with plans to expand internationally and beef up its New York office.
The round, announced today, was led by US investment firm Tiger Global, following an €8 million round in March last year. Since then staff have tripled. Arianee’s existing investors (BPI, ISAI, Cygni Capital and Noia Capital) also participated in this second round, with Commerce Venture and Motier Ventures. The round is a mix investment of equity in Arianee’s software solution and Aria20, the Arianee platform’s native cryptocurrency. In addition to global expansion and more hires, the funds will be used to continue developing Arianee’s products and services.
“Web3 is eating the world and we believe brands can leverage this revolution to regain control of their digital presence,” a statement from Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel, CEO and co-founder of Arianee, reads. “We also want to build for each and every user and not just for a minority. This requires robust and seamless tools and interfaces allowing communities to move from one world to another, from physical to digital to immersive.”
Founded in 2018, Arianee has been one of the key Paris-based startups helping shape the conversation around NFTs in luxury and fashion with its early embrace of Web3. It combines Arianee Project, an association that manages the open source part of the technology, and Arianee SAS, a software-as-a-service firm based on blockchain technology. Paris Fashion Week, as well as brands including Printemps, Breitling, Vacheron Constantin, Panerai and IWC, have used the platform to mint NFTs, distribute them to their communities and leverage them with for example personalisation. “We began as a service to help luxury brands create a digital passport for their goods. We then widened our offer to all kinds of tokenisation including purely digital assets, membership tokens and experience NFTs, allowing brands to leverage them for CRM, loyalty and personality,” Hurstel tells Vogue Business.
Tech startups that mint NFTs have mushroomed since 2018. Arianee intends to keep the first mover advantage by offering an end-to-end solution. The Aura Blockchain Consortium, whose founding members are LVMH, OTB, Prada and Richemont, focuses on the “upstream”, including tracking and tracing materials in the supply chain, while Arianee is more about downstream use cases such as customer relationship management.
Arianee, whose headquarters are in Paris accelerator hub La Caserne, is part of the growing Web3 ecosystem in the French capital, including startups Powder and Lynx.
“As a Web3 pioneer, Arianee has developed innovative solutions that are reinventing customer relationship management,” Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder says. “We are excited to support Arianee’s development and believe they are well positioned to become a leading global Web3 solution for brands.” Tiger Global’s investments have included Vestiaire Collective, Airbnb, Meta and Linkedin.
Clarification: Cygni Capital, not Cygni Labs, contributed to the funding round. (9 May 2022)
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