How We Raised $10 Million by Tokenizing Our Equity on VestaScan

How We Raised $10 Million with Tokenization and VestaScan

By Clinton Nivard, CEO of Womby

Thanks to tokenization and VestaScan, we published Womby’s equity investment opportunity and gave prospective investors a place to explore it. That became a turning point in a process that ultimately brought us $10 million from three investors, at a $50 million valuation.

Before that, I could explain our business in detail. What I could not explain was why nobody wanted to invest in it.

That is uncomfortable to admit as a CEO. You believe in what you are building, but your conviction cannot make somebody else’s investment decision.

We needed to change how we presented the opportunity—and how we reached the people who might understand it.

From a pitch deck to an investment opportunity

Womby develops smart contracts and software for institutional tokenomics. When you spend your days building something technical, it is easy to forget how much explanation someone outside the company needs.

Sending our pitch deck was not enough. We needed a clearer next step for interested investors.

We decided to tokenize our equity and deployed our token on VestaScan.

The investment was still an ownership stake in Womby, with rights defined through the appropriate legal documents. Tokenization gave that investment a digital representation. Our project page gave us somewhere to direct people after an introduction.

Instead of leaving a conversation with another attachment, we could invite someone to explore the opportunity.

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Your company does not need to be in blockchain

This matters because I do not want founders reading our story to think: “That worked because Womby is a blockchain company.”

An AI startup, a company building a data center, or a real estate developer can also explore tokenization, provided the investment has an appropriate legal structure and clearly defined investor rights.

An AI company does not become a blockchain company by tokenizing its equity, any more than it becomes a bank by taking out a loan.

Our business happened to be tokenomics. Yours might have nothing to do with it. The question is whether this approach fits the investment you want to offer.

We still had to find the right people

During our fundraising, Vesta provided us with ten potential investor profiles each month.

Those were prospects, not commitments. We researched them, contacted them on LinkedIn, and started the conversations ourselves. Interested contacts were directed to our project on VestaScan.

We also used ChatGPT to help identify business angels whose investment histories matched our pitch deck. Suggested names and previous investments still needed checking.

We were looking for people who understood the kind of business we were building. For an AI startup or a property project, that research would focus on different investors.

Brevo helped us organize email campaigns and follow-ups. LinkedIn supported individual approaches. Our project page brought those conversations back to the same opportunity.

There is nothing particularly glamorous about this work. Some messages lead nowhere. Some conversations stop.

The tools helped us organize the effort. We still had to explain why Womby mattered.

Two months later, the conversations had changed

About two months after deploying our token, we had received considerable investor interest.

That was not the same as having the money. There were questions to answer, terms to discuss, and decisions still to be made.

But we had moved from trying to get people’s attention to talking with people who were genuinely considering an investment.

Ultimately, three investors funded the full $10 million round at a $50 million valuation.

We had not needed everybody to believe in Womby. We had needed to reach relevant investors and give them enough substance to make a decision.

What I would tell another founder

Tokenizing our equity through VestaScan mattered. So did the research, introductions, and follow-ups. Together, they helped us build a fundraising process we could work through.

Creating a token does not guarantee funding, and our timeline is not a promise of somebody else’s results. It also does not replace the legal work behind an investment offering.

But you do not need to dismiss tokenization because your business is outside blockchain.

I spent a long time wanting other people to see what I saw in Womby. Now they have trusted us with their money, and I want the company we build to be worthy of it.

Ready to give investors a clearer way to discover your project? Start your token deployment, prepare your project information, and make it the next step in your investor conversations.

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