 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry |
|
| Founded | 2010 |
| Founder | Carter Cleveland |
| Headquarters | New York City , United States |
Number of employees | 90 (2015) |
| Website | artsy |
Artsy is a technology startup company based in New York City that intends to make all art freely accessible online. Its public website lets viewers browse over 230,000 images of artworks from close to 3,000 gallery and museum partnerships, including the New Museum and Guggenheim. It also covers major art fairs including Art Basel and Frieze. Visitors can search by art style, era, and description through over 800 traits hand-selected by a group of art historians for the Art Genome Project, a recommendation algorithm that decomposes artworks into their constitutive qualities and recombines them to predict user taste.
Artsy earns revenue from gallery monthly access fees and from benefit auction commissions. As of January 2015, Artsy has received $25.9 million in venture capital and has a 90-person staff. Carter Cleveland, Artsy's founder and CEO, began work on Artsy as a Princeton University undergraduate. Initial funding came from his savings, family, friends, and an entrepreneurship competition at his college. After creating a prototype, Artsy found angel investors and made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, where the site won an award. Artsy went offline for changes and raised $7.25 million from super angel investors and a Series A funding round. Artsy launched in October 2012.
At the site's launch, journalists noted that Artsy's image database was far from fulfilling its goal of displaying all of the world's art. Yale School of Art Dean Robert Storr was skeptical of the site's selection and taxonomy project, though the Cooper–Hewitt Design Museum's Seb Chan felt that Artsy served to expand the public's taste rather than to change art world institutions. Artsy changed its name from Art.sy in 2012 after journalists questioned the legality of using a Syrian top-level domain in light of sanctions against the country.