
If you want to flaunt your $1,200 Gucci handbag to your friends, there may be a cautious few who doubt whether it's truly Gucci.
But IYK is here to help you secure those much-deserved bragging rights, announcing Thursday that it has raised $16.8 million in the past year to help customers verify the authenticity of their apparel and merchandise.
Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm, a16z crypto, led the funding. Other participants included Palm Tree Crew, Synergis Capital, 1kx, Collab Currency, Palm Tree Crew, Coop Records, and the prominent non-fungible token collector gmoney. The cofounders of IYK, Ryan Ouyang and Christopher Lee, declined to give their startup's most recent valuation.
Arianna Simpson, a general partner at A16Z Crypto, said in a statement.
In a parched funding landscape, venture capitalists such as a16z have become more tight-fisted and NFT-based projects, like IYK, have progressively called it quits.
Lee, 34, and Ouyang, 22, are an unlikely duo. In 2021, they started messaging anonymously on Discord, a messaging service popular among crypto enthusiasts. He was then a software developer for Major League Baseball, and Ouyang was taking time off from college. Ouyang said he smiled at the news, slamming into a laugh.
The two established a friendship and eventually settled on an idea for a startup. ''It's technology-into merchandise,'' which allows customers to simply tap their phones to a patch on, say, T-shirts to verify their authenticity. Businesses can also track who owns their merchandise and remain in touch with customers.
Chipping T-shirts isn't a new idea, and there are other startups trying to progressively turn our clothing robotic, but Ouyang and Lee believe they have an edge. s kind of unique about our strategy is this flexibility and accessibility part, he said.
Brands can customize how customers claim ownership of their products through the number of times and duration they have to tap their smartphones on a chip.
Ouyang and Lee pitched their idea around and eventually landed a spot in a16z's Crypto Startup School this year, essentially a Y Combinator for aspiring crypto companies, and recently teamed up with Adidas. They raised their most recent influx of capital for IYK, which stands for 'if you know', as the program ended.
The chip is hidden behind this patch, and that it's like a portal to this whole digital universe, Ouyang said.