How The Italian Startup Hoken Tech Is Using Its New Funding

Congrats on raising new financing for Hoken Tech. How much money did you raise? And what are the terms of the deal?

Thanks, in this case, we managed to get 30 thousand euros from an Italian government fund dedicated to culture and art and in more the advantage of these funds is that only half we will have to repay over 8 years.

Who participated in the round? And how will these investors help the business grow beyond the money?

As previously mentioned, the main actor of these capitals derives, indirectly, from the Italian government, and this also allows us to demonstrate to everyone, how our project has the qualities and characteristics of interfacing with important institutions such as governments Worldwide.

What is your company’s current valuation? What data/traction/evidence supports this valuation?

We are still a young startup, but despite this, we are making great steps forward, and even the data we are collecting is encouraging and allow us to better define our goals and also the needs of users who are our first supporters.

What does your company offer today? And what do you think it will provide in the future?

Our business at Hoken Tech is to provide museums and artists with tools to catalyze frictionless, rapid trade of their art. We identify institutions looking for new revenue streams, facilitate the integration of the crypto-based solution, and attract visitors to museums who use QR Codes to buy the NFT too! This is not your regular art collecting closet; we can target all aspects of your business from concept to execution.

In the coming months, we will present something never seen in the world, that is an NFT distributor that can be placed anywhere, as it does not require electricity or batteries, and inside it is possible to insert a capsule that contains the NFT to be redeemed, all in a decentralized way and using the EOS blockchain.

What differentiates your product and/or offering from competitors?

In our case, our NFTs are eco-sustainable as they exploit the EOS blockchain, and for the uninitiated, it is the first blockchain in the world to be carbon neutral, and consequently, everything created on this blockchain, including the NFTs, I can boast of this title and feature. Furthermore, we can offer an integration of these NFTs also on users' websites to integrate something decentralized on centralized portals, having the advantage of both, in fact with our solution you can sell an NFT through any payment method, which it goes from PayPal, to credit card and even bank transfer, which not everyone can offer yet on the market.

Who are the founders and key team members? What exceptional skills, abilities and perspectives does this team have?

Pro tip: add a picture of your team!

Our team is currently made up of two members and in particular, Antonella, who holds the role of CEO of Hoken Tech, born in 1992 who, after graduating in business management, takes over the reins of the family's farm to transform it into an innovative startup of online commerce. And it represents the commercial soul of the company, essential for maintaining relationships with users of the caliber of institutions such as museums and other cultural and non-cultural bodies. Then we have Alfredo, who holds the position of CTO, and is the technological backbone of the startup thanks to his experience in the crypto and blockchain sector since 2011, he has accumulated the necessary experience to concretely develop products and services that exploit the blockchain, not to forget the numerous books also written in the blockchain field (in total he has written over 100 books), and the recent victory as Best Crypto Journalist 2021, also lies behind the NFT distributor which will be launched shortly.

In laymen’s terms, how do you plan on spending the money?

Half of the funds will be invested to cover all expenses related to professionals such as notaries, lawyers, and accountants to make all our operations legally proofed, to operate clearly and transparently, while the other part of the funds will be used for all the equipment and raw materials essential to operate in this area.

What’s exciting about your traction to date? And how do you plan on measuring growth going forward?

An important aspect of traction and the parameters to be taken into consideration is to have models and systems that are in line with our society. Obviously, as a young company, we did not have all this information but thanks to the incubation program, which we followed and won, we have learned a lot. Helios (which is part of the Helios VC in which Brok Pierce also participates), and their mentors such as Gavriel Shaw, who have provided us with several templates to use that we’ve found helpful, especially for us the SaaS template created by Christoph Janz is proving very useful and simple compared to other templates.

What are your revenue expectations over the next three years?

One of our advantages is that we can diversify the various sectors in which we can operate, and therefore we can multiply our offer by the various sectors, not only therefore to the art and culture sector, but also in tourism, the product sector agri-food and more. In this sense, we have developed a 5-year projection, by inserting our various fixed costs and the potential revenues deriving from the various projects that we are going to carry out.

What is your TAM (Total Addressable Market)? And what is your strategy to acquire the maximum share of this market?

Our main market is the institutional one and specifically the museums, which are over 55 thousand worldwide, of which over 4 thousand in Italy (we are only talking about public museums) and we aim to offer a new form of revenue provided by the digitization of works in blockchain through NFTs. And this is where our strategy comes into action thanks to the NFT distributor as it allows us to attract visitors and at the same time be able to exploit NFTs as a form of monetization.

In your funding raising pitch deck, what is your favorite slide?

What problem are you solving? And Why is now the time for your company to solve this?

The main problem that we are going to solve for institutions such as museums, is the recovery of capital for their structures, since, especially in Italy, most museums are free and depend on aid from the Italian government which is unfortunately not enough. This problem presents itself to us as an opportunity because thanks to NFTs the museum itself puts a new product in its catalog and in its store to be traded as if it were a poster, postcard, or catalog. In addition, thanks to the traction that the NFT sector had in 2021, many are and are approaching the same and want to integrate this technology in some way also in their company.

What are the potential risks to the business? i.e. technology, regulatory, incumbents, legal, etc.

One of the main problems we have, at least in Italy, is dictated by the lack of regulation, and therefore we must always be in line with what is promulgated by the Italian government and be compliant with them. In fact, having a company like ours in Italy and not abroad as most do, obliges us to follow all the laws of the country, and even if they are sometimes quite restrictive, it allows us to have a significant advantage towards competition, as it does not automatically comply with the various Italian laws, and this is why our company has relied on a law firm specialized in the crypto and blockchain sector, led by an extraordinary woman like Olivia.

What intellectual and digital property does the company own? Or intend to build/own? i.e. patents, patents pending, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, domains, bored apes, etc.

We embrace the same philosophy as the blockchain, where the code is open, public, and transparent, allowing us to be clear with everyone and provide something that others cannot provide, which is trust because if everyone knows what you do and how you do it, there is no 'it is a patent or secret that can provide the same trust as something transparent and public if it is not possible to verify it how can you trust that product, technology or patent, as you may have a patent but no one would know how it works or what secrets it hides.

Regarding digital assets, we have budgeted our cryptocurrencies so as to focus ourselves on this sector and this technology, and also because the amount of cryptocurrencies that a company owns is easily controllable thanks to the blockchain and it is impossible to change even in the budgets, making us also a reliable company also from a financial and economic point of view.

Why should we think Hoken Tech could grow to the moon?!

The only way that companies have to grow and expand is to offer innovative and cutting-edge products, and we too, being a company operating in the sector of new technologies, must constantly evolve and always provide new solutions to everyone, and this is why we have developed the NFT distributor, something that our competitors have not and have not thought of and which is difficult to replicate, which for us is already ready to be launched on the market, and has already obtained crazy numbers at events into whom we showed it, we even had to remove it because we had blocked an entire hackathon due to our distributor NFT.