Growing up between art and ambition
I grew up in San Francisco, a city where two worlds collide constantly — the creative and the entrepreneurial. My mother was an interior designer, which meant our home, our weekends, and our conversations were always shaped by aesthetics. I learned early that the objects around you carry meaning, history, and value far beyond what's visible on the surface.
At the same time, I was surrounded by startup culture — people building things from scratch, solving problems that seemed obvious in hindsight. It never occurred to me that these two worlds would eventually intersect in my own life.
A question of value
Now based in Brooklyn, I run my own interior design and events company — and I'm an avid collector myself. Art is part of my daily work and my personal passion. I know what it's like to stand in front of something beautiful and feel completely in the dark about its story or value.
The idea for ARTVAL struck while I was reviewing the results of a past online auction. The price swings were staggering and seemingly arbitrary. A piece that moved me deeply had sold for almost nothing. Another, which I found equally compelling, had fetched a small fortune. I found myself spending hours cross-referencing auction databases, artist registries, and museum records just to understand why.
That research process — painstaking, manual, and time-consuming — was something I did out of passion. But most people never would. And they shouldn't have to.
A tool for every room you walk into
I wanted to build something that condenses all of those research hours into a single photograph. A tool that uses the power of AI to reference every source I used to check individually — auction records, artist registries, museum databases, provenance records — and surfaces the answer in seconds.
Whether you're at a flea market, an art fair, your favorite museum, or quietly snooping around a relative's attic, ARTVAL is designed to bring light and valuable context to the art around you. No expertise required. No waiting. Just answers.
Art has always had gatekeepers. ARTVAL is the key.