Art website started at Princeton Pitch event

Two years ago, Carter Cleveland ’09 sketched his first plan for a website to match young people with art, as Pandora Radio does with music. Now, his idea has evolved into a million-dollar start-up company, Art.sy, which will match fine art with collectors.

The algorithm for the site incorporates 170 different dimensions of taste, including price range, medium, size and location. It then returns images for viewers and can connect them with the dealer.

“It’s essentially building a platform for artwork to be discovered on the Web,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi ’11, who heard about Cleveland’s idea at Princeton Pitch 2008, a competition held by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club at which students pitch 60-second business ideas to a panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Basu Trivedi has served as co-president of the Entrepreneurship Club.

When Basu Trivedi first heard of Cleveland’s idea, he said he thought it was “crazy” but that it made more sense to him after talking to Cleveland. Basu Trivedi first started working with Cleveland after the plan for Art.sy placed second at another on-campus business competition: TigerLaunch 2009. The business plan also won the audience choice award, which came with $4,000 and free office space in Silicon Valley for the summer of 2009.

Since then, Cleveland has convinced high-profile executives of his idea’s potential. His company, which has not yet made its website public, hopes to bring art appreciation to the masses.

Now based in New York City, the company has attracted a number of well-known investors. Among them are Eric Schmidt ’76, the chief executive of Google; Wendi Murdoch, the wife of NewsCorp founder Rupert Murdoch; and Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter. The company has raised $1.25 million from investors so far. Before the last round of investment, the project was financed through $160,000, according to TechCrunch.com. The seed funding was raised primarily from friends and family, Basu Trivedi said.

“Art.sy is an innovative approach to the discovery of fine art, and I’m excited to support them,” Schmidt said in an e-mail. “One of the best parts of my job is hearing a number of great ideas.”

Basu Trivedi, who is no longer working in an official capacity at the company, said the concept originated around Cleveland’s idea that artwork had an inherent social value, and he “wanted to build a company around that.”

“Carter was the one who had the vision, who originally planned the company. He managed to win the hearts of these investors as well,” Basu Trivedi said.

Cleveland declined to comment for this article. “Right now our PR strategy is to keep our heads down and stay tight-lipped,” he said in an e-mail.

Art.sy has received national attention. Most recently, Art.sy won the Rookie Disruptor Award at the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York City in May, which Basu Trivedi called “a huge turning point.”

In his presentation at the TechCrunch Disrupt competition, Cleveland said that people “don’t buy [art] because they feel unwelcome. They feel intimidated by the art scene. This is unfortunate, because art is universal. It’s something that everyone should be able to enjoy, and we think that with the right technology, that’s possible.”

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Basu Trivedi explained that the company received a lot of helpful support from University faculty in its infancy, citing electrical engineering professor Ed Zschau ’61 as a mentor.

“Professor Ed Zschau’s class on high-tech entrepreneurship was definitely inspirational for both Carter and myself. Zschau is like a father figure to the entrepreneurship scene here,” Basu Trivedi said.

Zschau has taught ELE 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship since fall 1997 and worked with students to found the Entrepreneurship Club in 1998.

Pointing to the past success of students in launching businesses, Zschau said he hopes such activities will “encourage more students to think about the possibility of starting new ventures right out of graduation.”

Basu Trivedi explained the benefit of the campus entrepreneurship community: “There’s a scene here of entrepreneurship that a lot of people don’t know about.”

“Ultimately we want to build a business out of this,” Basu Trivedi said, adding that he continues to promote the company even while in school.

The current Art.sy team of roughly 10 people works out of an office in New York. “Everyone thinks of creating a start-up as a glamorous thing, but in the end it takes a lot of really hard work,” Basu Trivedi added. “Carter and the current team are starting to reap the rewards of all the work they’ve put in.”

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article inaccurately described Art.sy’s original founding. It was later clarified that Nikhil Basu Trivedi ’11 began working with Carter Cleveland ’09 after the 2009 TigerLaunch competition, and that Cleveland competed in the Princeton Pitch and TigerLaunch competitions on his own.