New York City art world startup Art.sy, which launched at our first TechCrunch Disrupt and won the Rookie Award, is raising $1.25 million from a very impressive group of super angels on both coasts.
The investors include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Wendi Murdoch (wife of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), VC Jim Breyer, art “czarina” Dasha Zhukova, Founder Collective, Keith Rabois (Square, Slide, PayPal), David Tisch, Charlei Cheever (Quora, Facebook), Dave Morin (Path, Facebook), and David Kidder (Clickable). The round was led by Josh Kushner through Thrive Capital. Some of these names were reported earlier by Business Insider, but not the amount.
Art.sy previously raised about $160,000 in seed funding. After launching at Disrupt, 24-year-old founder Carter Cleveland decided to take the site completely private again while he shifted focus from a general-interest art-buying site to one more focussed on high-end art dealers and collectors. He signed up powerful New York city art dealer Larry Gagosian as an advisor and is negotiating with other world-class galleries to highlight their artists on Art.sy.
Cleveland is also scrapping a lot of the original features originally targeted at a younger audience, and instead trying to make it more of an art discovery tool for wealthy, older collectors. The new capital will go towards hiring engineers to help build out the startup’s “Art Genome” algorithm, which is modeled on Pandora’s Music Genome, except for fine art. The Art Genome algorithm breaks down artworks and artists into 170 different dimensions, and combines them into resultant vectors to help people find clusters of art similar to other works they might like. The core technology is about making better art recommendations and making it easier to discover art.
It is an ambitious project with many moving parts, but the art world definitely needs help becoming more Web-friendly. Art.sy is now planning open up publicly in the spring of 2011.
Art.sy is a new way to discover art you’ll love, featuring work from leading galleries, museums, and private collections around the world. Art.sy launched at Disrupt in New York in May 2010 winning the Rookie award. The site then shifted focus from a general-interest art-buying site to one more focussed on high-end art dealers and collectors. Art.sy signed up powerful New York city art dealer Larry Gagosian as an advisor and is negotiating with other world-class galleries to highlight their...
Thrive Capital is a venture capital investment firm focused on media and internet investments.
Founder Collective is a seed-stage venture capital fund, built by a collection of successful entrepreneurs. They are headquartered in New York City and Cambridge, but make investments all over the world.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations. Eric’s Novell...
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