On April 22, it was announced that Artory, which is a company that offers a blockchain-based art registry, had secured in excess of $7 million in Series A financing. One of the companies participating in the financing was an early investor in Spotify.

2020 Ventures, which is a private investment company, invested in Spotify when the Sweden-based audio streaming service was in its infancy. They have also invested in a number of other notable technology startups, including Postmates, which is a crowdsourced package delivery platform, and The RealReal, which is a platform for selling luxury goods. Now, they have made a sizeable investment in Artory, which offers a distributed ledger that allows users to record and search for data relating to artworks, including origin, ownership and sales history information.

Nanne Dekking, who is the founder of Artory, indicated that the funding would be used to improve not only the company's registry but also the functionality of the underlying platform as well. In regards to the latter, he said that the company is developing something that needs to be verifiably accurate, and it also has to be something that allows people to easily search through a deep set of data.

David Williams, who is the general partner of 2020 Ventures, said that his company likes platforms such as Artory, which takes large markets and opens them to a wider range of not just participants but also transactions.

One month ago, Artory acquired a company called Auction Club, which offered a subscription-based database that contained sales information about artworks that were sold through more than 4,000 auction houses around the world. It was reported at the time that Artory made the acquisition so that it could make the sales data from the database accessible by the public.

In October of 2018, Christie's, which is one of the world's leading auction houses, announced that it was collaborating with Artory on a pilot project. The project would utilize blockchain technology for managing auction data, and it would allow buyers of art to receive certificates that would provide details about the artwork they purchase.