Created by Paul Ginsparg, arXiv is a popular preprint platform that has become an essential scholarly communication tool in much of physics, mathematics, and computer science. It is also running on 25-year-old software written in a language (Perl) for which developers are becoming hard to find, and thus maintenance is increasingly expensive. arXiv’s Cornell-based leadership team is embarking on a campaign to support a soup-to-nuts rebuild of arXiv’s database, submission and review workflows, and public interface. In 2016, the team conducted a user survey to identify features most in demand and hosted a technical workshop to identify the challenges of a redesign. The next step is to move from general principles to initial design and prototyping, testing various infrastructure options for the full rebuild. Funds from this grant will support this 18-month planning effort.