Ferdinand Peter.

He completed a three-year apprenticeship as automotive technician in Switzerland, then spent several years on the floor of a tire shop. He was promoted to foreman, then to selling tires across a counter. On weekends he ran a small private trade in used tires for friends and neighbours.

In his mid-twenties he moved into car sales. A few weeks into the first role, at a Swiss Opel and Chevrolet house founded almost a hundred years earlier, the owner walked across the floor to tell him plainly that he was looking at the best sales start the firm had seen in its history. He moved through two more dealerships and finished as sales manager at a Toyota Lexus house in the canton of Zürich.

The lesson of those years was simple. The trade is learned by working it. Anything else is decoration.

He read the next decade correctly while the business was at its loudest. The manufacturers were moving toward direct sales. The free dealer was the next species under pressure. He repositioned, on his own initiative, before the curve closed around him.

He turned the floor toward the Vehicles a manufacturer cannot disintermediate. Cars whose value sits in their history, not their production schedule. Ferrari F40, F50 and LaFerrari. Pagani. Koenigsegg. Bugatti. Ferrari 288 GTO. A Swiss core of new and young-used Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes, Bentley and Rolls-Royce continued underneath, to fund the patient build.

Today the dealership serves several thousand Collectors across Europe and the Middle East, with a register that reaches into the rarest segments of the market.

The thesis that would later become Hiconium was first written here. In this category, the price is not a fact. It is a relationship. With the right intelligence, it could also be a number.

Under new ownership the workshop kept its archive, its bench, and its 35 craftspeople. Nothing on the floor was lost. The craft genealogy stayed in the building, and the parts of the previous structure that were not working were left behind.

Later the same year, HOF presented the Sir Class at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. A limited Vehicle, 11 examples, the fastest G-Class ever built. The reveal landed on the cover of Top Gear and on more than a hundred international publications within three days.

A founder usually builds his company. He saved one. Then he built another.

The world's most valuable Vehicles trade in private. Their prices are whispered, never written. Nobody had built the intelligence that records what an object is worth on a given evening in a given city.

Hiconium is that intelligence. It publishes a defensible price for the rarest moving Vehicles, computed from data the open market never sees: verified dealers, scored bidders, structured viewings, settled transactions. Underneath the platform sits a single readable mark for any rare Vehicle, the HICON Score.

The platform opens on August 13, 2026. It begins with cars. The long category that shares the same opacity — yachts, jets, watches, vineyards, design objects — follows in time.