ArtSmiley presentation from the Prepare 4 VC Demo Day

All right, so excited to have Art Smiley be our next presenter here. And Lurd, excited for you to share what you're doing in the art community with all of our audience here. And if anybody has questions throughout, you can ask them in the chat and we'll, we'll ask them directly to Lurd at the end of the presentation. You can take it away.

Thank you, Jason. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Lour Dallem. I'm the CEO and co-founder of ArtSmiley. So ArtSmiley is an online marketplace for art. Our mission, you know, is to make art more affordable and accessible to all communities and provide a viable career to artists. So what we are trying to resolve the problems, you know, before I talk about the problems, I give you a little story about a friend and colleague called Santosh. He's a brilliant artist, a realistic artist, you know, who do realistic paintings. But he quit art as a profession and joined us as a fabricator in one of my last company because, you know, when a guy, he's a brilliant artist, he left and joined as a fabricator, I asked him what happened, you know, why you quit as art. So according to him, one of the main reasons is, you know, whole long year he worked hard and done a lot of paintings but not able to make even $5,000. And it's just not the story of Santosh. Like Santosh, many other emerging artists have similar issues, you know, who can't able to access the traditional galleries and not able to showcase their artworks and market and gain the exposure they deserve when they're required. And this is one of the major problems we are trying to address. On the other side of the coin, finding affordable and unique pieces of art is a concern to art buyers, especially millennial art buyers who are more purchasing online. One other problem we also noticed is actually a lot of the customers, especially those like corporate houses or individual, you know, clients who want to decorate their walls on a regular basis, but there are no economical options. in original paintings so that they can decorate their walls on a regular basis. So these are some of the problems we're addressing through our solution. You know, we— it is arts— ArtSmiley addresses these problems. So why now ArtSmiley? ArtSmiley— this is the moment. If you look at the pandemic affected many of the industries, you know, is art— is art world is also being affected. And a lot of the traditional art galleries you know, gone online. I would say most of these galleries now have an online presence. And another point is, during the last quarter, art sales has increased by over 150% compared to the same period in the previous year. And then the iceberg effect, you know, I talk about emerging artists. 80% of these artists are unknown or unshown. So there is a great potential opportunity. That's where Artsmiley is coming in. So who is ArtSmiley? ArtSmiley is a multi-sided online community where artists and art buyers can, you know, connect 24/7 in the same platform. Art buyers can, you know, find their favorite artwork and place the orders. Artists can, you know, upload their artworks and make money. And we are also providing our art world community a cultural diversity because we're bringing a large collection of artworks from different parts of the world, and we are showcasing in our platform. In a nutshell, we consider ourselves our Amazon of artworks. So what is our product we are trying to offer here? You know, is actually ArtSmiley offers all kinds of contemporary art and sculptures.

Okay.

And this includes from abstract, illustrative, to photography and sculptures. We provide all kinds of contemporary artwork. Our main services we provide to B2B and B2C are sale of original artworks and sale of limited edition prints and art rentals, art consultancy service. These are some of the services. How we support our product for artists and art buyers, as explained a minute ago, artists can upload their artwork and it goes to the curatorial for approval and it will be connected to the potential buyers. On the other hand, art buyers can search and select their favorite painting. And it can place the order within few clicks. The painting will be delivered to their doorsteps without any hassle. So I'm going to talk about art market. You know, art market is actually very attractive globally. In 2019, the net worth of art market is $64.1 billion. You know, also art market registered 40.5 million transactions which is highest in a decade and 2% higher than the previous year. This shows that a lot of millennials and high net worth millennials are, you know, moving into online, and that's where you see the increase in the transactions. So online art market in this, you know, $64.1 billion, if you talk about around approximately 9% is online market, that is around $5.9 million— sorry, $5.9 billion of this art market and online. And this online art market is expected to grow over 15% every year from $4.64 billion in 2018 to $9.32 billion by 2024. Okay. And Artsmiley aiming to achieve $59 million of revenues over next 5 years, which is equates to 37,000 of transactions. So how are we going to achieve this? We are Artsmiley planning to adopt 3 levels of marketing to reach out the wider global audience of artists, art collectors, art buyers, from home decor to large corporations. The 3 stages is art fairs is one of the important stages how we market our product. You know, these are some of the art fairs happens across the world. We picked some of the large art fairs where the audience turnout is higher. Like example, you know, here at Frieze London, they have 70,000 visitors. ARCO Madrid, 100,000 visitors. So there's a lot more potential ArtSmiley can reach out and, you know, find their required audience and customers from these art fairs. On the other side, we also are planning to have partnerships with artists, auction houses, art collectors, especially those who don't have an online presence. So it helps, you know, build our relation and, you know, for a longer term. Being an online platform, we also want to focus extensively on digital marketing such as social media, SEO, Google AdWords. Or LinkedIn. So we want to reach out to the right audience of our customers. If you look at our competitors, ArtSmiley competes both online and offline with different players. However, in online, we compete with some of the major, uh, uh, uh, of course, the competitors are Saatchi Art, Artfinder, RaiseArt, Artsy, Art.com. If you look at, uh, compared against to all these competitors, ArtSmiley offers a wide variety of features such as we are bringing more focused art from emerging talent. We're also building our relations from the local communities. We also offer art rentals. If you look at this, is some of the key advantages we have over our competition. What's our, uh, um, sorry, competitive advantages compared to Agnes or competitors? We are first to market in art rentals in the Middle East and Africa. And we are also one among the few only globally. We also want to have partnerships with local communities, colleges, and universities to showcase hidden emerging talent. And our platform is very user-friendly. And we're bringing emerging talent to make art more affordable. And we also have a regional advantage, know-how of the customer requirements in the region, in the Middle East and the African region. And we also plan to have adopt latest technologies like AI and AR/VR to improve our customer satisfaction and also plan to have a blockchain cryptocurrencies in the art in the near future. So how we make money? ArtSmiley takes 35% commission on all art rentals and sale of art prints and sale of original paintings. And we also take commission on all of our partner services like printing services and framing services. So our traction to date, we have more than 1,300 artists from over 50 countries. We also have partnerships with B2B clients, and to date we have 100+ customers and generated over $100K of revenues. If you look at the early adopters are from international and national hotel groups where we have supplied paintings and we have partnerships, like example Shangri-La, Al Bayt, And we also have worked with infrastructure development companies like Shurouk based out from UAE and Abu Hassan from Abu Dhabi. We also supplying paints, paintings for, you know, corporate houses like Cyrus Group. So the leadership team, it's leading by myself, Lourdes, as a co-founder and CEO. I have over 20 years of experience in operations and business management. Being an art enthusiast, I moved into this role. bringing my expertise of international expertise of Middle East and Europe into this platform to ensure and to accelerate this in the right way. And I also introduce our co-founder and CTO, Mrs. Aruna Alam. She also has over 12 years of experience in IT and extensive knowledge in, you know, front-end, back-end, and website development. She looks after all the, you know, technical part of the ArtSmiley. And we have Rajiv, who is actually currently acting as marketing chief marketing officer, who has also have master's degree in computer science and having digital marketing, worked in digital marketing head in different other businesses. He is an expert in digital marketing. He's looking after all our digital marketing services. And the main key important person, not, not the last but not the least, actually to say, Vikash Kumar. He's our art consultant and curator who also has master's in arts and aesthetics, who's been in the industry for so long and curated many exhibitions for local and international art galleries. He's been a focal for us, you know, looking at it, good quality of artwork being showcased in our platform, and he maintains all our artist relations as well. So we were planning to make, um, with the first year with the $2 million of revenue, and it will be over a 5-year period up to $6 million of revenue. So there is a tremendous growth, uh, growth in the business with the availability of funding, and we expected to make compound annual growth rate of 131% in revenues, 105% in profits. and 166% in cash. So what we are looking for from the investors, we are seeking a million-dollar investment to achieve 1,200 transactions in ArtSmiley over 12 months of operations, which translates into a revenue of just over $2 million. The funding will be mainly spent in technology development that includes upgrade of our website and develop a new app. And we also be spending hugely on sales and marketing. And the more important thing, we will be hiring critical digital marketing, IT development team that will help us to accelerate the business in a faster way. So what is the exit strategy? There are many ways to exit as the business grows. Some of the recent developments in arts and crafts is actually— some of the examples are recently, which is just a month ago, Artfinder, UK-based art platform, raised $1 million in equity. $1 million of funding over crowdfunding platform. RaiseArt, and again another UK-based platform, raised approximately $1 million in July 2018. Art.com, a USA-based platform for art prints, acquired by Walmart in 2018. Artsy, a marketplace for art, raised their Series D, $50 million in 2017. And also Etsy gone into IPO with with a share price of $16. And Saatchi Art also been acquired by Leaf Group in 2014 for $17 million. So that's about from me. Thank you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Laird. Great presentation. We have a couple of questions in the chat I'll get to, and if anybody has any additional more brief Feel free to submit them. But yeah, thanks. No, that was, that was great and excited about your platform and everything you can offer.