Digital World

In San Francisco’s South of Market district, two former classmates from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and their team are plotting the next wave for the art world and just may disrupt the art market…again. Depict is a platform for digital art, doing for visual content what iTunes and Spotify have done for music. Digital art is postmodern art, explains Kimberly Gordon, co-founder and CEO of Depict, the online marketplace that launched in 2014 where in-house curators collaborate with artists to sell original digital pieces. Backed by investors including Jim Pallotta- who co-owns the Boston Celtics and is president of the A.S. Roma soccer team- and Weili Dai- co-founder of Marvell technology- among others, Gordon and co-founder Shambhavi Kadam are targeting digital art collectors.

The pieces are inspected for resolution, and then sold in unique editions thanks to technology that embeds an invisible signature on each image. These signatures mean that even if the work emerges on the open internet, its exact provenance can be traced. Depict has managed to create a way to manufacture scarcity, much like a lithograph or a photograph. They also have a subscription service that loans out digital art to users, who can then buy the work at the end of the month if they like it, and a third business model: which is a high-resolution digital frame designed by Branch Creative. www.depict.com