When former Christie’s co-chairman Loic Gouzer launched his auction app Fair Warning in 2020 as pandemic lockdowns halted art sales, it was an experiment. Last year, after a short break, he recommitted to the concept and, a few months ago, secured $5 million in a ten-day Series A funding round. In recent weeks, he has offered for sale two meditative landscape paintings by Lucas Arruda and Sterling Ruby from 2015 and 2013, respectively.
Fair Warning and several other major art-tech startups were founded by gallery and auction insiders in response to pandemic-related challenges. The companies, and their founders, were careful about taking investment from venture capital firms and tech luminaries, instead leaning on financing from close contacts in the art world. Now, five years since the start of the pandemic, the companies are slowly moving toward profitability, a cautious approach enabled by the source of their funding.
When Gouzer started looking for funding for Fair Warning’s Series A, he got some interest from venture capital firms, he told ARTnews. But in the end, the company went with backers across tech, luxury, and the collecting world—investors who were aligned with the company’s vision. The approach, Gouzer said, allows the board to be highly selective about the art it chooses to sell, while reaching a valuation of $20 million.
“We decided not to take any interest from VCs—it’s too early in the process,” Gouzer said, adding that he’s focused on attracting users and investors who have art backgrounds. “It’s a complicated market now. During Covid, you had a lot of people who were buying art for the wrong reasons, investments and so forth, and there were real collectors that sat out that period. All those momentum chasers are gone now.”
Another founder with a similar approach—one who has gotten far less publicity—is Oliver Miro, son of London blue-chip dealer Victoria Miro, who founded a virtual reality start-up Vortic Art in 2020 as a tool to get artworks in front of collectors without the logistical burden of transporting them amid the pandemic-driven shift to digital. The goal, Miro told ARTnews recently, is to replicate the sensory impact of physical spaces and serve as a “digital twin” for planning and archiving high lift shows.
Starting Vortic was in some ways a response to working in sales at his mother’s gallery for a decade, Miro told ARTnews. He saw the gallery take some hits from lacking a digital entry point, an issue that became more pronounced during Covid, when the gallery closed its physical location for several months. As the art world reopened, the need for a product like Vortic grew even higher, Miro said, given the high operating costs necessary to keep up with art fair travel.
(Two years into the pandemic in 2022, the gallery’s operating costs rose by 45 percent to £35.9 million, according to UK financial filings. Its profits still quadrupled from £1.9 million to £7.5 million in the same period.)
Like Gouzer, Oliver has grown Vortic slowly, avoiding what might be the more commercially advantageous approach to developing a VR product. By design, Vortic doesn’t collect pricing or collector information, so it doesn’t have a proprietary database. It also doesn’t run advertising on its site. The technology is built from scratch, custom to art galleries, with the idea being that it’s more focused on getting approval from its peers and artists than being marketable to outside tech investors. The startup has worked with around 120 museums and galleries so far, though a spokesperson would not reveal the company’s annual revenue or how many of those partnerships are still active.
“In the tech space, money and caution collide,” Oliver said. “I’m coming very much from a traditional background. We’re not trying to build the company up to sell it.”
In the art world, a “traditional background” often refers to the family business, and indeed Oliver has been able to build Vortic in such a way because he is not under pressure to deliver the expected returns, monetization, or exponential user growth required by tech investors. That’s because Vortic has been almost completely funded by his mother’s gallery. Recently published UK financial filings reveal that shortly after Vortic was founded, it received a £1.4 million loan from Victoria Miro gallery. Three years later, in February 2023, the loan was converted into equity, and the gallery invested an additional £5.7 million. The gallery has been using Vortic for its online platform ever since. The investment allowed Vortic to grow its team from 5 to 14 employees between 2022 and 2023. The only non-founder at Vortic that owns shares in the company is British tech billionaire Simon Justin Nixon, whose collection was shown in Venice during the Biennale in 2022 by the company.
Victoria Miro’s ownership stake in Vortic is less than 20 percent, a gallery spokesperson told ARTnews, and Vortic maintains that it operates independently of the gallery. The spokesperson declined to provide Vortic’s valuation and said that Nixon is not on the company’s board.
Oliver admits he’s in a fortunate position and said he expects it will take two more years for the company to become profitable.
Gouzer reported a similar attitude, saying he’s building his app not toward unicorn status, but toward being profitable as serious collectors reenter the market after Covid. So far, Gouzer said the company has completed $50 million in auction sales since the company’s launch and its private sales arm has surpassed that level. (He declined to disclose the private sale figure.) As sales grow, caution and selectivity are still the main priorities, he added, explaining: “With Covid, there was a degradation in connoisseurship.”
Other major art-tech ventures have operated similarly. In May 2021, David Zwirner launched the e-commerce company Platform, spearheaded by his son Lucas. Zwirner initially invested $5 million in Platform, incorporated as a separate entity under David Zwirner Digital LLC. The original business model was to offer 100 works of contemporary art each month, ranging in price from $2,500 to $50,000. In 2022, the company had a second funding round, with investment from Zwirner and a small circle of investors, including Chanel board member Alain Wertheimer, bringing total investment to $10 million. Platform was incorporated as a separate entity under David Zwirner Digital LLC. In December 2023, the company shifted its business modelto focus on editions and luxury collectibles after they struggled to reach their sales goals.
Like Miro and Zwirner, Pace Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher also dipped his toes into the art-tech convergence with experiential art center Superblue, aiming to bring large-scale, ticketed installations to audiences in ways that traditional white cube spaces had yet to figure out. Founded in 2019, the company in some ways has exemplified what Fair Warning and Vortic have tried to avoid: the application of tech’s growth expectations to the more insular world of art.
To get off the ground, Superblue took a $15 million investment from EmersonCollective, a for-profit philanthropic company founded by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. Two years later, it took over $15 million from Therme Art, a cultural subsidiary of Therme Group, a Vienna-based company that creates large-scale “wellness centers.” By December 2022, the company had burned through most of its funding, as it tried to rapidly expand beyond its flagship art center in Miami. Glimcher stepped away from a leadership role at the company that year, and Jobs and Emerson Collective relinquished their seats on the board. In 2023, Superblue’s Miami-based parent company reported an $8 million loss, according to regulatory filings, and Glimcher maintained less than a 50 percent stake in the business. That same year, digital design agency Metajive filed a lawsuit claiming that Superblue owed over $75,000 in unpaid wages. Superblue later reached a private settlement with Metajive.
Metajive founder Dave Benton told ARTnews that from the tech perspective, there’s still uncertainty about how galleries, collectors and museums aim to blend credibility with mass appeal as these companies age. “It’s still finding its footing,” he said.
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