Over $2 million in seed funding secured by NFT marketplace

Over $2 million in seed funding secured by NFT marketplace

By Alice Leetham - min read
Image of a man looking at a digital art gallery

Async Art is revolutionising the space through programmable art that allows creators and collectors to immerse themselves in artworks

The Silicon Valley based digital art platform, Async Art, announced yesterday it had secured primary seed funding of more than $2 million. Investment firm Lemniscap led the funding round, with support from Signum Growth Capital, Galaxy Interactive, Divergence Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, Collab+Currency, Semantic, Inflection, the LAO and Placeholder, which led the previous round of seed funding.

Async Art was launched in February 2020 and is built on the Ethereum blockchain. It aims to revolutionise art through the new movement of programmable art, which comprises a Master work and Layers that are independently owned and controlled.

Artists can deconstruct their work into Layers which have abilities enabled and can be modified by collectors. For example, the owner of an artwork could link Layers to time or some other external data source so they would change autonomously. In this way, Async Art users can themselves become a part of the artwork.

CEO and Founder of Async Art, Conlan Rios, explained, “At Async, we believe the future of digital art is programmable. Art is most impactful when you see yourself in it and programmable art allows collectors and artists to immerse themselves in artistic works like never before.”

Async Art has achieved a lot in a short space of time – the platform has already seen over $5 million in bid volume, more than $1 million in art sales and launched a dedicated smart TV app for displaying art.

On top of this, Async Art’s first NFT was sold last October by prestigious auction house Christie’s – Robert Alice’s “Block 21”, a digital portrait of the Bitcoin code, made headlines when it sold for over $130,000.

The company is currently looking for a community manager and a platform developer to expand the team, with plans moving forward to develop more Async artwork display methods and onboard even more users.

The Lemniscap team commented, “As financial use cases continue to solidify their value proposition in a decentralised setting, media is the next frontier primed for disruption. By enabling the shared ownership of art pieces and dynamic influence over their appearance, Async Art is turning the existing concept of art on its head and is paving the way for a whole new category of programmable media.”