Artfare

Artfare was started late last year by Aki Karja and Joonas Makkonen. After a long career in finance (including investment banking, private equity, and hedge funds) Aki left Wall Street to start Artfare. The idea for Artfare was born through Aki's personal experiences in the art world. Having several artist friends in NYC, he witnessed how broken the art market was when looking at it from a business analyst's perspective. While many other industries have been democratized by technology, for some reason, the art world seemed largely left behind stuck in archaic and nonsensical ways of doing business.

Fast forward to late 2017, Aki was introduced to Joonas by a common friend. Joonas is a seasoned technology executive with an engineering background and was managing a tech consultancy in NYC at the time. After that initial meeting, Joonas and Aki decided to team up and spent considerable time together exploring the idea further including building a prototype app (built by Joonas and his team at Reaktor). After extensive due diligence (which included attending numerous art fairs and meeting with tons of artists, gallerists, curators, art magazine editors, art advisors, etc.), they were convinced that the Artfare's unique business model had the potential to transform the global art market. Over the ensuing months, Aki and Joonas raised substantial seed capital and built a team of five people.

The Artfare platform development is outsourced to a NYC based technology partner and we are looking to hire a lead mobile engineer to augment and take over some of the outsourced efforts after the launch in the fall. Over time, we will build an internal development team managed from New York.