By
Steve Muchoki
April 17th, 2024
Verisart’s funding will be spent on extending the product and engineering team as well as launching a suite of premium services aimed at artists, galleries and collectors.
Verisart is a platform designed to conduct certification and verification of artworks of different types which is carried out with the help of blockchain. Now it has become known that it has managed to get $2.5 mln in seed financing. The list of the most prominent participants of this round included Sinai Ventures, Galaxy Digital, EOS Fund, and Rhodium. The money raised will be used for further expansion of the company’s art platform.
Robert Norton, who is a co–founder and CEO of Verisart co–founder and CEO, noted:
“With this new round of funding, we’re able to scale our business and ramp up our partnership integrations. The art world is quickly realizing that blockchain provides a new standard in provenance and record-keeping and we’re looking forward to extending these services to the industry.”
According to the information provided, the money raised will be also spent on improving the product offered by Verisart, expanding its engineering team as well as launching a range of premium services for the target audience.
What Is Verisart?
Verisart is an easy and safe option for artists, galleries, auction houses, and online marketplaces that want to certify and verify artworks and collectibles in real–time. The company’s mission is to increase trust and liquidity in the global art market. Verisart is going to achieve that by uniting transparency and uniformity in certification and verification of works of art and collectibles.
Verisart creates digital certificates for works of artists and owners. These certificates are connected with a time–stamped provenance record, with the Bitcoin blockchain acting as a permanent, decentralized and anonymous storage. Access to the certificates is easily and instantly gained via either smartphone or computer. The uniqueness and permanent character of these certificates allow Verisart to significantly reduce the risk of fraud and falsification.
Established in 2015 by Robert Norton, Verisart is his third business in the sphere of art and technology, after Saatchi Art and Sedition Art. As Verisart states, their company was the first in the world to apply the distributed ledger technology to the physical art and collectibles market.
Since its launch, Verisart has established collaboration with a row of art industry shareholders, including eBay, Art Systems and the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS). Moreover, it has managed to start cooperating with Ai Wei Wei and Shepard Fairey, among some other most famous artists in the world. Moreover, the company is a founding member of the Arts Innovators Alliance, an organization that unites forward–thinking art businesses that aim at advancing the art industry through innovation and technology.
In 2018, the company got the prize ‘Hottest Blockchain DApp’ at the European tech startup award. Recently, it has become the first provider of blockchain certification on Shopify.
Earlier, nobody thought of the connection between blockchain and art. But the practice shows that it can be real, Verisart is a bright evidence of that. It is interesting what further products this company can offer, but we will see it later.