Artsy is an online platform for discovering, learning about, buying, and selling visual art. It builds and hosts sites for roughly 1,800 commercial galleries across 90 countries and pairs marketplace listings with editorial content, including an in-house magazine. The site attracts about 2 million unique visitors per month and facilitates approximately $20 million in sales each month. Auctions are the fastest-growing segment after Artsy secured partnerships with Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips; auctions have quadrupled in number over the last year. Artsy now accounts for one-third of received bids for the auctions it hosts and nine percent of all sales, and it plans to invest the new funding to expand its auction capabilities. Planned product work includes features like video auction streams, though the company notes latency and global transaction distance create technical challenges. The business model combines marketplace services and gallery websites to address high transaction costs, long lead times, and limited pricing transparency in the art market. Artsy operates an online platform for learning about and collecting art, providing free access via its website and iPhone app to a large database of artworks. The site hosts 250,000 images by 40,000 artists and aggregates content from over 3,000 galleries, 400 museum and institutional partners, and more than 50 select art fairs and auctions. Its database is powered by The Art Genome Project, a classification system that maps connections between artists and artworks. Artsy is led by founder and CEO Carter Cleveland and president and COO Sebastian Cwilich. The company intends to use the Series C funds to expand operations. The article situates the company in New York, NY. Art.sy is developing a web platform to make browsing, discovering and buying fine art easier and to connect prospective collectors with galleries. The site is still in a small private beta while the company strikes partnerships with top galleries. To date Art.sy has deals with 180 galleries across 40 countries as it lines up supply before a broader launch. The company is taking a long-term approach to digitizing the art world and aims to make art more accessible to a broader class of consumers. Art.sy will use the new funds to hire additional staff and is actively recruiting a web designer and a director of museum relations. Financially, the company has raised prior seed capital and is now advancing toward a full public launch backed by influential investors. Art.sy is a New York City art-world startup focused on art discovery and recommendations for high-end dealers and wealthy collectors. The company is developing an Art Genome algorithm modeled on Pandora’s Music Genome that breaks artworks and artists into 170 dimensions to produce similarity vectors and recommendations. Founder Carter Cleveland pivoted the product from a general-interest art-buying site to a private, discovery-focused service and signed dealer Larry Gagosian as an advisor while negotiating with world-class galleries. Art.sy previously raised about $160,000 in seed funding and has now secured new capital to hire engineers and build out its core recommendation technology. The startup plans to reopen publicly in spring 2011. The current round brings in a group of high-profile investors to support its technology and gallery partnerships.

Total raised

$82M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Jul 2017