Polychain Capital, Paris Hilton and Others Invest $20M in Swiss-based ORIGYN Foundation

ORIGYN Foundation has received $20 million in a private strategic raise, which increases its valuation to $300 million, the organization said on Tuesday. 

Investors that participated in this round include Bill Ackman’s Table Management, Paris Hilton, Coinko, Polychain Capital, Vectr Ventures, Carter Reum, Div Turakhia, GD10 Ventures and others, it said. This was the company’s first external investment round, ORIGYN’s CEO Daniel Haudenschild told Blockworks. 

“We have some big partners lined up that will be announced in due course, but the movement of real-world valuable assets into the digital one is well underway,” Haudenschild said. 

The one-year-old Swiss-based nonprofit has a technology that “certifies and guarantees the authenticity of physical and digital items using advanced recognition and identification techniques” via computer vision, artificial intelligence and decentralized infrastructure, it said. 

The organization has a digital certification platform that helps non-fungible token (NFT) owners identify and authenticate their physical and digital items through its technology. 

“[The system] is using AI and computer vision to identify advanced features of luxury goods and mapping that data on a fully decentralized blockchain with no cloud instances,” Haudenschild said. 

The ORIGYN Foundation has a handful of products including ORIGYN Art, ORIGYN Collectibles, ORIGYN Digital Media and ORIGYN Luxury. 

The art sector focuses on connecting physical art with NFT certificates, while the collectible sector helps users trade collectors’ items. Separately, the digital media ecosystem is for creators to build their social capital, while the luxury subdivision is for digital certification of authenticity for luxury objects, it said. 

“ORIGYN will officially launch digital certificates across art, collectibles, digital media, and luxury goods during the first half of 2022. The foundation’s utility token, OGY, will also become publicly tradable in 2022,” Haudenschild said. 

Funding for this round will help accelerate its mission and contribute to expanding and improving its four products, as well as fund ongoing research and development while onboarding its partners into the crypto ecosystem, the non-profit said. 

“Bridging physical goods with digital certificates is the next evolution of NFTs,” Haudenschild said, adding, “NFTs are more than just digital images, and we’re excited to show the world what is truly possible with this technology.”

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