Blockchain biz platform Aragon ends ICO in 15 minutes with $25M raised

Aragon, the decentralized management platform for companies, announced today that their token sale has raised $25,000,000 USD in less than 15 minutes from 2403 buyers across the world. Originally set to run until June 14, 2017, the Aragon token sale becomes the 4th highest funded crowdsale ever, in any category, trailing only The DAO in crowdsales of financial technology.

Built on Ethereum, Aragon is the first management tool developed specifically to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of companies all around the world. Aragon will offer a new, more efficient model for companies to operate and requires only the Internet to function. It implements basic features such as cap table management, governance, fundraising, payroll, and accounting, supporting all areas of company management through an easy-to-use interface.

Luis Cuende, Co-Founder and Project Lead at Aragon  said:

“We are extremely delighted with the success of our token sale and are humbled that the community has placed this trust in Aragon. We now have the resources to hire the best talent and execute one of the most ambitious projects, one which has the potential to create a more equal and fair society.”

“In their very nature companies exist to create value. We believe in people’s ability to innovate and exchange ideas irrespective of borders and third party intermediaries. Therefore, Aragon was born to unleash people’s true capability by removing unnecessary barriers and allowing the global permissionless co-operation of talent.”

While the token sale was uncapped, Aragon placed a hidden cap, cryptographically sealed and only revealed during the sale. Luis Cuende said: “For our token sale, we placed a huge focus on security, not wanting to put the Ethereum Network at any risk. Therefore, we set a hard coded cap into the sale contract.”

Despite accepting over 45 currencies through a partnership with leading digital asset exchange ShapeShift, the full token sale amount was invested into the Aragon platform in Ether due to the speed of the sale.

Earlier this month, Aragon established an Estonian-based non-profit, Aragon Institution MTÜ, which will deploy the revenue from the token sale. With the funds raised, Aragon will focus on the development of Aragon Core and the Aragon Network (AN), implementing security audits and hiring additional developers and operational staff, bringing the team to 10 people over the course of 2017.

The Aragon Network will be the first decentralized autonomous organization whose goal is to act as a digital jurisdiction that makes it easy for organizations, entrepreneurs, and investors to operate. The mission of the network will be the development of the Aragon Core contracts, contract upgradability services for all Aragon Core contracts with a built-in bug bounty mechanism, and a decentralized court system.

As outlined in the Aragon Development Plan, a for-profit organization, Aragon Dev will be created, employing a team to work on the Aragon platform, and acting as a service provider for the Aragon Network. Over the course of 2017 and early 2018, development will focus on deploying minor releases each with additional features, laying the foundation for the first major release in late 2018.

The platform is available for Linux, MacOS, Windows and web browsers.