Art+Tech accelerator Fuelarts announced the closure of the seed round of funding, in particular from Katie Cohen, founder of the venture capital fund Amedeo Global, mentor of 500 Startups & Techstars.
According to representatives of the accelerator, the received investments will go to the development of solutions for the art market in the field of gamification, digital art, including NFT, and technological solutions for market players.
Denys Belkevich founded Fuelarts in the fall of 2019 in New York. Belkevich is an art economist, investment and art asset management consultant.
Co-founder, board member, and mentor of the project is Roxanne Zarnegar, professor at Sotheby’s Institute in New York, ex-executive director of Christie’s in America, she also served as vice president of the largest online art platform Artnet.
Denys Belkevich noted that thanks to the rapid development of online auctions and digital NFT art, the pandemic has qualitatively changed the rules of the game and opened a new era of exponential growth of the Art+Tech market. In most museum programs, their business ideas are not realized, and in traditional accelerators, they rarely understand art specifics and try to “reinvent Uber”. Fuelarts is unique in its niche nature, geared towards the Art+Tech realm.
As representatives of Fuelarts noted, the creation of an accelerator during the pandemic dictated a special business model for working with startups of the first batch. Fuelarts offered private acceleration: support of startups with two or three mentors until the market recovers.
Among the startups of the first batch, the Ukrainian startup V-Art is a platform for showcasing, selling, and collecting digital art, which creates an ecosystem for the global digital art market.
