Arianee, an alliance of brands that develops distributed ledger blockchain technology to track and trace luxury goods, today announced it has closed $9.6 million in seed funding.

The company aims to develop its technology for members to create what it calls “digital passports” for any object, guaranteeing authenticity and securing resale. This round brings together leading financial technology investors in the technology and blockchain industries, including Bpifrance, ISAI Fund, Cygni Labs and Noia Capital, and includes a number of other investors such as Thibaud Elziere, Jonathan Cherki, Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse.

According to Arianee, since the 2000s, luxury brands been subject to great disruptive changes to their commerce models due to e-commerce and secondary markets. With the capability of circular economies, transparency, traceability and responsibility added by blockchain technology brands can innovate their products and provide trust.

Blockchains use cryptography and widely distributed copies of ledgers to create an indelible record of transactions that can include certificates of authenticity. These certificates can include serial numbers or other identifying features of items so that they can be matched to luxury goods so that they can be authenticated by third parties, and the blockchain can be used to provide trust that the documents have not been tampered with.

That’s the vision that led to the development of the Arianee protocol.

“Arianee is reinventing the customer relationship with fashion and luxury goods players through a unique value proposition based on the digital identity of an item,” said BpifranceGuillaume Creative Industries Investor Guillaume Simonaire. “The company has proven the market-fit of its product, and has all the assets to become the reference solution for brands wishing to address tomorrow’s major issues of second-hand goods, authentication, and traceability.”

In 2020, Arianee completed its platform and created an open-source software-as-a-service offering, which makes its technology directly accessible to brands that want to integrate it. Thus, companies can offer customers a customized and personalized experience by developing apps using their own interface and produce “digital passports” that operate in real time using their own information technology infrastructure.

To make this happen, Arianee uses blockchain-based solutions and non-fungible tokens, a technological standard for digital valuables, and a utility token, the Aria20, to which all investors in the round gain access in addition to the equity.

The NFT works by attaching to the luxury object (with its provenance information) and becomes its digital twin, as its “digital passport,” on the blockchain that provides its authentic self. At the same time, when a transaction occurs, tokens are exchanged to make the transaction operate and that’s the function of the Aria10 utility tokens.

The number of brands currently using Arianee’s technology is already expanding and currently includes luxury brands such as Breitling, Vacheron, Constantin and more.

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