Arweave’s ecological file synchronization application ArDrive has just completed a $1.6 million financing. Founder Phil Mataras talked about the financing experience and experience.
Written by Phil Mataras, founder of ArDrive Translator: Yin Cao, Managing Director of Digital Renaissance Foundation, Investor of ArDrive
When I founded ArDrive and started exploring the vision of “permanent storage for everyone,” I knew I would face many challenges. I am full of confidence in solving some of these challenges, but for others, I know it will be difficult because I am simply a “rookie” in those fields. One of these difficult challenges is fundraising. Like many of you, I have never introduced a vision and product to investors before, but I am happy to try it!
So far, most of my experience comes from watching the live TV show “Shark Tank”.
“Shark Tank” stills
As you can imagine, actually raising funds is not the case. In fact, fundraising is not like on TV, where you hold a conference that invites all investors to attend, and then listen to their comments on you, and then you are forced to conclude a deal or make a fool of yourself in front of the audience to please the audience.
Instead, the real fundraising process spanned countless meetings of dozens of investors over dozens of weeks. I always thought that in the spring of 2021, I could raise funds for the ArDrive community, but I underestimated the time required and the lessons that will be learned in the process.
ArDrive is not the familiar encryption project that everyone is familiar with. We are not a core protocol or blockchain, but a consumer-centric distributed application supported by the Arweave Profit Sharing Community (Note: Profit Sharing Community, a token economic model unique to the AR community created by Verto Exchange) program.
I know that this unique form of financing may be difficult for some cryptocurrency funds to accept. I used to think that as long as I was honest, kept proactive, socialized like crazy, and accepted constructive criticism along the way, fundraising would be successful.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of venture capital funds, investors and angels to meet. I took full advantage of my existing relationships and soon met with teams from all over the world on a regular basis. It is no stranger to me to enthusiastically promote the same deck of cards over and over again. I used to work at KPMG, where introducing and defending technical solutions to a variety of technical and non-technical audiences, budgets, roadmaps and risks are vital tasks. In order to raise funds, I had to reopen my brain!
There are many things to learn during the journey, and as I get feedback, my voice improves. To be correct, investors want to get all the details, whether it is to get the right transaction structure, market entry strategy, token economic model table or core business model and decentralized community aspects.
After a while, I felt like I was participating in some kind of VC quick fundraising party.
Of course, there are some investors who are obviously not suitable, and there are some investors that I think are interesting, but there will be no more information. But each of them gave me good feedback, more references, and further boosted my motivation. After several weeks of deep impressions, I worry about whether my speed is fast enough.
Did I say something wrong? Is this deal not satisfactory enough? Is permanent storage not as powerful as I thought? These questions echoed in my mind. It’s just that my “self-defense” system is always looking for flaws to try to improve. As a founder, it is important to be true to your vision, but I think it is also crucial to question your narrative and tone, so that you can break through yourself.
April is when things really start to heat up. The partner of Mask Network introduced SevenX Ventures to me. They saw hope in our vision and immediately committed to our work and helped us succeed. They were able to introduce me to IOSG Ventures and D1 Ventures, and they also believe that permanent storage is the basis of web3 applications. Their friends at the Digital Renaissance Foundation (D1) also feel similar. Both D1 and DRF are actually ArDrive users, and they know how easy it is to upload data permanently! It’s always nice to hear users’ voices, but I’m very excited to hear that they want to co-lead our seed round event! This is undoubtedly an important guarantee for our victory in this round.
Joining them are Kilowatt Capital, the Arweave core team and some close angel investors. Each team has its own expertise and will help us develop in the East and West markets. I am deeply grateful to them, and to every individual and team who brought opportunities to me and our community.
By the end of April, this round of financing had been completed. In fact, we were eventually oversubscribed for US$1.6 million!
On the morning of May 19th, Coindesk broke the news of our achievements, which was in stark contrast to the broader crypto market sell-off. However, the price of Bitcoin will not change the value of permanent data storage or our use cases. This is why I am still very optimistic about ArDrive (and Arweave) and hope to use these funds as much as possible in order to create as much value as possible through our products.
Regardless of our bank balance, our task is the same-it will be stored permanently in the hands of anyone who wants to store data permanently. So now back to product promotion. For the rest of this year, we will focus on a few things:
- By providing legal currency entrance to easily obtain AR tokens, our application is more accessible.
- Through extensive user experience and interface redesign, our products have a high-quality look and feel.
- Extend our business scope to desktops and mobile devices with the help of apps.
- To provide users with better reliability and performance for uploading and downloading.
- Add new features such as advanced sharing, image thumbnails and multi-user drives.
Part of this also involves expanding our team. In the next few months, we will recruit technical, marketing and communication resources to build ArDrive Core Team 2.0. If you are interested in working with us, please pay attention to our “Jobs” page for upcoming positions!
We do believe that giving back to the community is very important, which is why we have been running the “use mining” project Dust. I would also like to take this opportunity to announce that we will also vote to donate 10,000 ARDRIVE tokens to the new decentralized autonomous charity chARity.
Not everyone in the world is as lucky as us, so for me, we have to share our bounty with those in need to make sense. I look forward to these partnerships and be able to integrate them with our profit sharing community!
Although this was an incredible learning experience, since the end of the round, I can take a breath and return to our product. I believe this is not the last chapter of my fundraising prospectus. Who knows, maybe we will one day promote our community to the fiercest investor on TV in the “Shark Tank” program.
Until then, we will always work hard to build our community and provide the best experience for permanently uploading your most important data.
Have any questions, concerns or comments? We hope to hear their voices! Email me phil@ardrive.io or join our telegram group .
Source link: ardrive.io
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