Dark Arts
San Francisco, CA, United States
Overview
Dark Arts is an early-stage investment firm that collaborates with leading universities, national labs, and research institutions to commercialize scientific research for public benefit. We work with researchers in physics and chemistry to build companies around their research, investing our own seed capital, and connecting them to our network of corporate customers to find a viable path to market. Although our work is for profit, we are motivated by the fact that our success generates income for research institutions through technology licensing and equity deals, further advancing basic research. Dark Arts was founded by Andy Artz, a San Francisco-based venture capital investor, former technology executive, and Harvard physics grad.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 1
Sector focus
- Chemical
- Clean Energy
- Industrial
- Laser
- Nuclear
- Quantum Computing
Investment portfolio
- Baton Media
Participated · Equity · Nov 2023
Baton is a music collaboration platform that lets artists, producers, managers, A&Rs and catalog administrators share unreleased music, source new material, collaborate, and track who views and interacts with submitted work. Founded by musician Gabe Warshaw, the company launched a private beta in 2022. The product highlights individual viewers of material and includes an automatic payout system to help ensure creators are properly credited and compensated. Baton is building a blockchain-based decentralized infrastructure to allow creators to upload songs without the risk of IP theft. The company says it has helped connect hundreds of artists and protect the IP of thousands of songs, with clients including DJ Dahi and A&R Sickamore. Baton plans to use new funding to further develop its product, grow its team, roll out new features, and build a mixed-media collaboration and rights-management ecosystem for visual artists, filmmakers and designers.
Team
Andrew Artz
Founder & Managing Partner
LinkedIn