Last February, a small group of us first huddled in a basement in San Francisco's Mission district and prepared a livestream to announce Async Art to the world. Over the previous months, we had collaborated closely with 13 creators on a genesis piece for a new art form, one that would allow artists to deconstruct their work into Layers and for collectors to own and use said Layers to alter the final work.
Our goal was to change the way that people saw digital art and to hopefully enhance it in a way never before possible using programmability.
The night before I was nervous, unsure of whether anyone would either notice or care about what we were trying to do.
To our surprise, the pieces received over $15k USD worth of bids on the opening day and by the end of the week "First Supper" had sold collectively for over $80k USD (Master + Layers).
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Async Art had been received more positively than we possibly could've imagined and for that we're eternally grateful ❤️
A year later, we've accepted over 270+ artists to the platform who have made over $1M in sales. One of our NFTs, "Block 21" was featured in a Christie's auction and we have two dedicated apps to display programmable art. Over the summer our community came together and raised over $10k for kitty charity and "‘sä-v(ə-)rən-tē" by Micah Johnson won the very first NFT of the Year.
Today we're thrilled and humbled to announce that we've secured funding to turn what started as "experimental art" into a real programmable art movement.
Leading the round is Lemniscap along with Galaxy Interactive, Signum Growth Capital, Semantic, Blue Wire Capital, Collab+Currency, Inflection, Divergence Ventures, the LAO, and previous seed round leader Placeholder.
At Async, we believe the future of 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.
Programmable art is a new movement in which creators deconstruct their work into “Layers” and endow them with abilities. Collectors can then own and alter artworks through said Layers. Layers can even be hooked up to external data sources such as time to change autonomously.
With this funding we intend to focus efforts on onboarding more creators to the platform and develop more ways to display these ever-changing Async artworks. Our team is looking to expand with an opening for a platform developer and community manager. If our work so far has inspired you then we'd love to talk 😊
In the words of Josie Bellini, one of those 13 genesis creators, "Onward".
