There is a spider in Madagascar that produces the only naturally golden silk on Earth. No dye. No treatment. The gold is the thread itself.
Trichonephila inaurata — known locally as the Halabé — is the only creature on Earth whose silk comes out gold. Weight for weight it reaches around five times the tensile strength of steel, and far outperforms it in toughness — the energy a fibre absorbs before it breaks.
One stated limit: the silk does not tolerate water — so no ready-to-wear. The maison is built on what never gets wet: jewellery, haute couture embroidery, artworks and sealed objects. Water resistance is a defined complementary R&D path; nothing in this plan depends on it.
This raise funds one road. We are a materials company that farms spiders; the great luxury groups are the buyers.
If no house moves, the fibre itself sells at five to eight times its production cost. The farm pays for itself either way.
Bon de Saint-Hilaire presented the first treatise to the Académie des Sciences in 1709. Father Camboué revived production in Madagascar at the end of the nineteenth century. A bed canopy was bound for the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris — the ship sank off Madagascar, and the craft went down with it.
The last known owner of a golden spider silk piece was Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III. For over a century the savoir-faire was considered lost. We brought it back.
of golden spider silk already produced with our own machines and processes
reached at sale on past batches, with demand outstripping supply every time
proof of concept achieved: a colony of 400 spiders successfully reared in our own facility
first pieces made with the École Lesage and the Atelier du Bégonia d'Or, gold embroiderers since 1666
In autumn 2017, Shane Cooper, founder of the American brand DeFeet, bought a few grams of thread from us. In June 2018 he turned them into the first socks ever knitted from golden spider silk: designed by fashion designer Alexander Julian, sold at $5,000 a pair, the first of them presented on a crystal trophy to the Quick-Step team at the start of the Tour de France, to go on display at its headquarters in Belgium.
We orchestrated none of it. A client turned a few grams into a collector's piece, and the press followed — proof, supplied by a third party, that the value of this material is created in its transformation.
Covered by Gear Patrol, Bikerumor, Cycling Industry News · DeFeet press release, 6 June 2018
The four groups that own most of global luxury have each come to the table. One approached us to source the material and received us at its métiers innovation site in 2024. One arranged a meeting with its fibre house, which saw a strong match for jewellery. The chief executive of a third told us one of its flagship brands would be interested, on one condition: a water-resistant finish. The fourth signed a mutual NDA and passed a spool to its high-jewellery house. Names, dates and contacts are in the investor file.
Reared together, these spiders devour one another — the reason no farm has ever held. Reared one to a vessel, cannibalism disappears entirely. We took the hatching rate of the cocoons from roughly one in ten to very nearly all of them by holding the humidity at eighty percent, and carried four hundred animals to an advanced stage with no moulting loss.
Drawing a continuous thread off a living animal is a separate problem altogether. We built a motorised prototype that reels without a single break — the gesture that turns a spider into a supply.
Neither exists anywhere else. Both were developed here, both remain undisclosed, and both are patentable — a filing programme is part of what this raise funds.
A gram of silk is roughly eight hundred reelings. We have timed every gesture: one minute to feed an individual, ten minutes to reel it. A hundred and forty-seven hours of human work per gram. That is precisely why no spider farm has ever held — and it is the only problem this raise funds.
| Stage | Per reeling | Per gram | Direct cost | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today, entirely by hand | 11.00 min | 147 h | €2,567/g | ×1 |
| 24-post reeling frame | 1.42 min | 19 h | €331/g | ×8 |
| + automated feeding | 0.57 min | 8 h | €132/g | ×19 |
| 48-post frame + handling | 0.26 min | 3 h | €60/g | ×42 |
Once the frame is in place, feeding accounts for two thirds of the time that remains. That is where the second stage is won — and it is a problem already solved elsewhere: insect farming has done it at industrial scale for a decade.
These are industrial husbandry gestures applied to an animal that has never been farmed industrially. The reeling prototype already exists and draws a continuous thread without breaking it. What remains is to multiply it by twenty-four, then by forty-eight.
The result is forty times the capacity at constant headcount, and a gram that costs sixty euros. That factor, and nothing else, separates a curiosity from a maison.
One road, four forms. The material is the base; jewels, works and editions are successive multiples on the same gram, and they are what makes the gold famous before a house buys it.
Sold by the gram, as specimen, to collectors and to houses that want to test it. Every batch offered has sold. This is not our volume: the same gram is worth twelve times more once transformed.
Pendants and brooches, each unique and numbered, made with master artisans — and haute couture embroidery commissioned by the great ateliers. A few dozen a year, never more: the scarcity is the product. First pieces already made as proofs of concept.
Major pieces commissioned from Meilleurs Ouvriers de France and Maîtres d'art — one tribute to each Art, up to a violin whose sound will exist nowhere else.
True to the essence of the medium: editions that could come from no other material — the recorded voice of the spider-silk violin, a work seeded by the exact gold of one batch. Directions open to us, not a catalogue we already hold.
Collector's fans, haute couture buttons and passementerie, watermarked paper for certificates of authenticity, and the case linings of other maisons' high jewellery. Each is dry by nature and consumes a minute quantity of silk. None of them is priced into this plan — they are directions the same gram opens.
Cost and collection figures are targets at scale, not measured results. Prices shown were achieved on past sales.
Rebuilding the colony and standing up the reeling frame takes twenty-four months. We will sell nothing before that. It is written as it is: 2027 is a year at zero, and the plan funds it. Everything after depends on one number — the grams the workshop reels each month.
produced per year at the five-year horizon — the plan's only variable
of revenue in 2031, on finished pieces rather than raw material
first year at operating break-even
gross margin once production is running
The detail — profit and loss, month-by-month cash, the material balance in grams and the labour assumptions — is in the business plan, available on request.
Every result below was obtained on native dragline silk from Nephila and Trichonephila — the exact material we produce, not recombinant protein. None of it is the object of this raise, and none of it is priced into it. It is what opens the next one — as is a complementary R&D programme to make the silk water-resistant, the step that would open ready-to-wear.
Conduits of native spider silk have reconstructed nerve defects over 20 cm in human patients, with primary wound healing and no adverse reaction to the implant. The furthest-advanced clinical use of this material.
Braided native silk reaches more than twice the tensile strength of nylon suture, with no loss of strength over 1,000 fatigue cycles.
Dragline silk is intrinsically an optical fibre: it guides light to 1400 nm, and has been used to build fibre-optic chemical sensors.
Native dragline woven on frames and seeded with fibroblasts, then keratinocytes, has grown bilayered skin. Spider silk carries no sericin — the coat that makes silkworm silk immunogenic.
It buys control of a material. Loro Piana does not sell vicuña fibre — that control is exactly what allows four and a half thousand euros for a stole. Golden spider silk is the only material on earth whose production nobody yet holds, and that is what this maison is building.
Four groups have already opened their doors: a sourcing approach and a visit to a métiers innovation site, a meeting arranged with a fibre house, a chief executive's interest for a flagship brand subject to a water-resistant finish, a mutual NDA and a spool passed to a high-jewellery house. Those doors opened with no production behind them. This raise funds the production, and the finish is tested in its first six months.
Rather than disperse the material, grant a single group a three-year right of first refusal over the entire output. That is liquidity without dilution, and it locks the scarcity in rather than eroding it.
| By 2031 | |
|---|---|
| Revenue | €3.33M |
| EBITDA | €2.38M |
| Exit value at 5.9× EBITDA (4.2× revenue) | €14.0M |
| Return on €500K for 25% | 7.0× |
This plan assumes no technological breakthrough. It rests on three checkable assumptions: a jewellery piece at twenty-five thousand euros — Hemmerle's secondary-market average — a major work at a hundred and eighty thousand, and three hundred grams a year where labour alone allows four hundred and twenty-four. The business plan sets out the calculation and the downside case.
Bpifrance, the French public investment bank, typically tops up a round of this size with a low-interest loan.
Serial entrepreneur. Co-founded BnbLord, grown into the largest short-term rental operator in France and Portugal and acquired in 2019 by GuestReady, Europe's leading rental management group.
Today runs Lavie Maison and owns the ~70 serviced apartments it operates in Paris, Bordeaux and Nice, and is developing a portfolio of micro-hotel suites in Paris.
Entomologist and arachnologist. Has founded and run insect-rearing companies, worms included; leader of the amateur arachnology community; created and operated a golden orb-weaver spider farm. Wrote our rearing protocol and will run the farm.