Onyinye Anyaegbu, a business innovator with over 10 years of experience working across product and business development, built ARTSPLIT to make art investment accessible while aiming to “democratise the arts industry known for its exclusivity and elitism.”
Focused on driving the African art market in the international art world, Anyaegbu’s works are commendable and can’t go unrecognised.
In a chat, she takes us through the journey.
From the name ARTSPLIT, I could guess that this is an art-related colony even before reading about it. But putting the words together — Art and Split, I’m wondering how you came about this combo. Could you tell us the inspiration behind the name?
Literally, what we do is split art. If you think about fractionalisation; we take a piece of work, apply that same model and fractionalise it up so people can then buy into it. This could be a physical art like a painting, a sculpture or other forms and outlets of art.
It’s giving people the opportunity to buy into a piece of art and then manage that as an asset.
So how do you collate the works of these artists and connect investors to them? How are you able to gain connections with these African contemporary masters?
Our focus is African art and we try to be pan-African as much as possible. We ensure that we get works that reflect and come from different parts of Africa and also from African artists in the diaspora.
The idea is that works listed on the platform, either our own works that we’ve curated and collected or works that collectors or galleries tend to list by selling on their platform, are the works that then get split. It goes into what we call an auction and people can then bid for split or shares of those works.
There are different ways we connect to these contemporary masters. We could buy through big auction houses, investment-grade artists, collectors and several other ways.
How are you able to split these works?
That’s where technology comes in. We’ve created our proprietary platform that allows us to do this. The model is broken into a 100 thousand splits; for example, a painting is worth $200,000, we take that work, split it into 100 thousand splits, which means that it takes your entry point of that work to $2 per split and then people can afford to buy 10 splits or 50 splits and the app allows you to do that very easily.
Users can only co-own these works through the app. It’s a physical work, not an NFT.
If you get into our app, you would then be able to log in, register your details, verify your account, load your wallet either through your credit card or through a bank transfer if you’re in Nigeria, or MoMo if you’re in Ghana or PayPal and you can get started on an auction.
Further explaining the split, Anyaegbu says the painting is split in terms of value, not that it’s divided into pieces. The painting is still there, but because 50 or 100 people now own one piece of work, it then makes us ask the question; “who gets that work physically?” Hence, the lease auction comes into play.
This allows whoever wins the auction to have that work physically in their space for two years and the income from that lease auction is then shared with the owners of the work based on their percentage of ownership.
What are the criteria for picking someone that would own the work? Is it just by the highest bidder or there are other factors involved?
It’s simply by auction, they apply the same auction rule. If it’s for the split auction, the highest bidders, up to 100 thousand splits are the ones who would win the split and for the lease auction, giving is just one item and whoever is the highest bidder takes that work.
Emphasising the lease auction, Anyaegbu explains that ownership is limited to two years as the work goes back into auction to decide who else gets to enjoy the work.
Have you always had an interest in art or it was triggered at one point or the other?
I grew up around art but looking at it from this angle we are addressing it by, which is the alternative investment space, it’s something I have now grown to understand and build my own knowledge and capability to be able to bring that back to my users and customers.
I don’t paint, I’m not an artist, my job is to create the technology and the business model that allows for ARTSPLIT to happen.
How did your family and friends support your focus on art rather than other conventional jobs?
I grew up in Benin City, Nigeria, which has lots of bronzes and other artworks, it was quite an artistic space. For me, it was more of applying my love of art to a business point and using that to then create what we have.
One of my co-founders is my brother so there’s a family element to ARTSPLIT as well.
What year was ARTSPLIT launched?
Before the pandemic, it was conversational. We started working on it last year and the app went live in April this year. It’s been an interesting seven months.
How much traction has ARTSPLIT made and what are your expansion plans?
We started out in Nigeria, the bulk of our team is in Nigeria, but we are currently 22 countries represented in terms of users. We have 13,000 users and if you split them, it’s over 22 countries and the bulk are Nigerian users. We are trying to expand and create more diverse users on board.
On the app, we’ve done about $1 million in transactions and we are hoping to end the year with 20,000 users to give us a good standing for next year.
In terms of funding, we have done four rounds and are on our Series B funding at the moment.
We do have people who have invested in us before and after we went live and we are trying to manage our expansion rate now.
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