The round was led by Borderless Capital and James Wo, founder of DFG and Jsquare
Artory, the art world’s leading blockchain-secured, digital art registry, has closed a $4.5M fundraise to initiate its next phase in bringing trust and confidence to the art market by tokenizing physical artworks to prepare them for trade in the financial and crypto markets. The Artory team’s deep experience in the art industry, combined with the crypto network, expertise, and capital provided in this raise, allows Artory to accelerate the liquidity opportunities for the most trusted physical artworks through NFTs.
Artory was an early pioneer in the registration of verified provenance information about artworks and collectibles. Partnerships with art market industry leaders and esteemed art collectors have already demonstrated Artory’s unique value proposition in addressing inefficiencies and risks in the current legacy systems.
This raise is co-led by Borderless Capital, a blockchain-focused venture capital group investing in category-leading businesses to build innovative financial products through the Algorand borderless economy. Borderless Capital CEO and founding managing partner, David Garcia, will join Artory’s board to help execute the next phase in the digital registry’s development. “The future of the art market is on top of blockchain technology, and Artory is ahead of the curve playing a key role to transform this legacy industry. We are proud and excited to join Artory and the team, and we support their vision of building new financial rails for the art ecosystem,” says Garcia.
Artory will leverage Algorand’s open source blockchain as the infrastructure of its art registry and tokenization platform. Algorand accelerates the convergence between decentralized and traditional finance by enabling the simple creation of next generation financial products, protocols, and exchange of value. Algorand’s modern technology is helping to democratize the creation and ownership of NFTs by solving challenges not yet addressed by other blockchains: reducing the environmental impact, solving fast finality, and lowering costs.
Co-leading the round is founder of DFG, James Wo, and co-founder, Joanna Liang, via their new venture firm, Jsquare. Wo and Liang invest in the coming cornerstones of mainstream crypto and blockchain applications through Jsquare. “The art market needs Artory and the trusted art assets they will create. The potential here is extremely exciting, and we believe this next phase of the company will benefit every facet of the market,” says Wo. Wo and Liang have previously invested in virtual asset providers, such as Circle.
Prominent additional investors in the blockchain and tokenization space include: Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, Steven Kokinos, CEO of Algorand, Joeri van Geelen, and Qinwen Wang. Rodriguez-Fraile, as a crypto entrepreneur, investor, and collector, is known for his early adoption of blockchain technology, NFTs, and his digital art collection—he is credited as one of the most influential art collectors in the digital art ecosystem.
Blockchain Valley Ventures (BVV), a Swiss-Singaporean venture capital firm dedicated to emerging technologies and blockchain, also joined the round. Throughout the fundraise process, Artory collaborated closely with BVV to leverage their sector expertise and global network to navigate the crypto world complexities.
Founded by well-known executives from the art industry and the art-data space, Artory is already backed by prominent investors, UHNWI, and esteemed art collectors who are actively contributing to Artory’s growth story. Artory’s current investors, including Hasso Plattner Capital and Knickerbocker Capital LP (formerly 2020 Ventures LP) continued to invest as strong advocates for Artory’s vision. Knickerbocker’s past investments include Spotify, 1stdibs, and Coinbase.
The investors are a vital part of Artory’s next phase, as Artory brings trusted artworks to the alternative asset and crypto markets as robust and accessible financial products. Artory Founder and CEO, Nanne Dekking says, “This group of crypto powerhouses and market experts is completely aligned with Artory’s vision for a stronger and more efficient art market. We’re incredibly grateful to have these investors in our corner as they are the ideal partners to add to Artory’s long-standing art expertise and well-established credibility in the art market as we enter this next phase.”
Artory is uniquely positioned to bring NFTs of physical artworks to market. Artory was the first to capture due diligence from trusted institutions and secure it in blockchain. Now, Artory will issue NFTs for these trusted physical artworks and provide the data oracle service for ongoing validation. “NFTs have been popularized this year to represent digital art and collectibles,” says Artory CTO Timothy Kompanchenko. “However, the technology itself is designed to represent unique items of great variety: a ticket to a live event, a deed for a real estate property, and, in our case, a title for a physical artwork.”
Stay up to date on Artory’s exciting upcoming announcements and developments on The Artory Blog.
