Arthena

Arthena is a fintech company headquartered in New York, NY, specializing in asset management within the art market. Founded in October 2016, the company participated in Y Combinator’s W17 batch and operates in the growth stage. Arthena offers financial products that provide access to the alternative asset class of art, focusing on the most liquid segment of the art market with the lowest volatility. The company utilizes an automated, data-driven investment strategy, employing a statistically rigorous model to estimate the value of artwork over time. This model relies on auction records and repeat sales data, using Monte Carlo analysis to determine annualized returns and Sharpe ratios, thereby validating the financial viability of its products with statistically rigorous bounds. Arthena’s technology brings rigor and clarity to the art market, transforming a $1.7 trillion-dollar industry by providing an operating system for data-based, art market pricing transparency. The company has accumulated a database of over 3 million transactions worth $95 billion, with more than 100 features per lot, and has developed 7 proprietary technical products. Arthena’s machine learning infrastructure allows for quick iteration on different modeling approaches, making it the only player in the industry with such capabilities. The company has built multiple proprietary products around data cleaning, tabling, and visualization, and every art asset is accompanied by a fully automated investment report. Serving regions including the United States, America/Canada, and offering remote and partly remote services, Arthena was acquired by the investment platform Masterworks. The company continues to create machine learning-based solutions for the art market, allowing for better understanding, pricing, protection, hedging, and investment in art assets.