Evo becomes one of the first European companies to leverage smart contracts to give employees equity
LONDON, United Kingdom; July 4, 2022— Evo, the Artificial Intelligence company with offices in London and Turin, Italy, granted its team members with at least one year of tenure stock options using smart contracts tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain: cementing its leadership position as a technology innovator.
“The Evo team is now invested in the company’s long-term upside. By offering them equity via smart contracts, we simplify many logistical constraints attached to traditional shares and options: the benefits flow directly to our people,” said Fabrizio Fantini, the CEO of Evo.
The 2022 grant equals 2% of company’s shares, out of the 10% which will be allocated over the next five years. The terms can be expressed in plain English and implemented through smart contracts that guarantee full transparency and automatic, trustless execution. Implementation can be understood and monitored by recipients more easily than traditionally lengthy legal documents.
Because smart contracts are self-enforcing and take care of all the required bookkeeping themselves, maintenance costs are minimal. Smart contracts are quick and easy to deploy and, once-issued, impossible to revoke. Employees can feel confident in their shares as Ethereum blockchain tokens are completely transparent both inside and outside the company.
Most importantly, however, tokenized options are tangible incentives that align Evo employees with growth goals. Recipients usually cannot profit from shares until an exit or an IPO, but the Ethereum token can be traded once vested. This means our team can choose to benefit within one to three years from the grant as options vest.
“We didn’t want stock options to be this somewhat abstract benefit that may fail to motivate the team. Evo tokenized options can be held awaiting an exit as usual or they can be cashed out the moment they vest. It is entirely within their power to decide,” said Fantini.
The technology itself is well established, now leveraged in a new way to grant stock options. Evo shares have been created around the ERC-20 standard which implements fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, extended with features to further strengthen ownership and security; in other words, the stock options are embedded within public tokens issued to employees on the Ethereum blockchain in a decentralized manner.
“There is still a lot of misunderstanding and scepticism around the blockchain world, but this project contributed to strengthening our company’s technological culture, providing an entry-point to the constantly growing Web3 domain” said Evo CTO Davide Dal Farra.
“Tokenized shares are another way that Evo is staying on the forefront of innovation that creates impact, a key value that drives our company,” said Fantini.
About Evo Pricing
Evo is a leading London and Turin-based tech company that uses AI to optimize supply chain, pricing, and customer decisions. Since 2015, Evo has helped clients leverage Big Data to increase the customer relevance of business decisions, which helps reduce waste, optimize market efficiency, enhance product availability, increase margin and raise service levels. Evo’s algorithm started as Evo CEO Fabrizio Fantini’s PhD thesis, as a way to address limits of traditional pricing software. Since then, Evo’s applications have increased in sophistication and accuracy, as well as scope, with autonomous solutions covering price management, markdowns, forecasting, customer scoring and replenishment.
Download PDF: English
