Artisio, a complete auction management solution, has secured £250K in pre-seed funding. The investment round was led by early-stage focused venture capital firm Jenson Funding Partners.
The funding will help Artisio reach a global auction market looking to streamline the way online auctions are run. It has its sights set on expanding to the US market and aims to launch a self-onboarding platform to accelerate the process for new clients.
Berdia Qamarauli, Founder and CEO of Artisio, said: “Within the industry, there are many verticals that need to be accounted for, but there’s a lack of solutions that can be used across the board. We’re excited to develop a solution that can be used by all verticals in the auction industry, streamlining time-consuming and complicated processes.”
Sarah Barber, CEO of Jenson Funding Partners, added: “The auction industry like any other has its own list of unique problems, but a notable lack of solutions. Artisio is disrupting this legacy sector with a product made for auction houses, by a team that has experienced the problems first-hand.”
Brings full automation to auction businesses
The auction industry lacks innovation and the systems required by auction businesses are often fragmented. These businesses rely on multiple services for clients, which requires them to manually handle sale information from different vendors in order to upload it to back-office systems, making processes slow and inefficient. Given that auctioneers are required to manage multiple streams of data on third-party platforms, it takes 30 to 40 minutes to process a single lot from receipt to payment, resulting in an inefficient use of resources.
Founded in 2020 by Berdia Qamarauli and Suri Amarasinghe in 2020 in London, Artisio addresses these pain points through automation, streamlining the auction system by bringing all processes, including bidding, into one place.
Artisio was founded with the customer in mind, bringing a fragmented operations system into one place. The solution is customisable to an auction house’s needs and integrates seamlessly into any currently implemented systems. Full automation with Artisio means that auction businesses can carry out tasks and bidding in an all-in-one admin panel that can be tailored to specific needs.
To date, Artisio has signed up 15 auction businesses, including 167-year-old London rare stamp dealer Stanley Gibbons, 151-year-old coin and medal specialist dealer Baldwin’s, and major retail returns platform BPI Auctions. Also, it has onboarded four international clients and is working with several online auction providers, including the-saleroom.com, StreamBid, and AI email marketing platform Artbrain.
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