Cohart – Building Operating System for the Art World’s Middle Market & Their Anti-Hype Views on AI
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
Written by Dilan Abeya, Mindset & Life Coach
Dilan Abeya in the founder of a company that builds Bespoke AI Persona's, having previously been an Investment Banker and Model based in the UK. Abeya also has a mentoring company that uses AI version of himself "AI DILAN" on its platform.
Cohart didn’t start as just another online gallery, it started as a fix for a broken system. CEO Kendall Warson, a former producer of immersive art shows, saw the gap up close, 86% of artists operate without gallery representation, juggling QuickBooks, Mailchimp, Squarespace, DMs, and PDFs just to keep the lights on. On the other side, a new wave of millennial and Gen-Z buyers want meaningful art but don’t identify as “collectors” and don’t know where to go between IKEA and the auction houses.
Cohart’s answer is refreshingly clear, build a social, data-driven marketplace on the front end, and a vertical SaaS “business OS” on the back end, so artists and galleries can actually run and grow their businesses wherever sales happen.
From scrappy start to focused momentum
Early on, Cohart tried to spark “community first” with swipeable profiles, DMs, and follows, the social layer every founder dreams of. Reality check, asking people to leave Instagram on Day 1 is a tall order. So Kendall redirected the team toward commerce and then tools, learning the hard lessons most marketplace founders learn later:
You must earn supply retention before you scale demand.
You need clean data and trust signals before you can unlock conversion.
You keep the team small, distributed, and specialized (SF, NYC, Vietnam, Switzerland) to ship fast and stay capital-efficient.
That discipline paid off. Cohart now powers recurring subscription revenue for artists and galleries via website hosting, invoicing, collection management, and more, while still enabling marketplace transactions on top. Sales volume has grown, but more importantly, sales are getting steadier. This gives the company a credible path to $1-2M ARR on the way to Series A.
The middle-market thesis
Kendall is betting big on the middle market, buyers in the $2k-$50k band who are motivated by identity and story, not just status. These buyers want the “Spotify experience” for art, taste-based discovery, social context, and zero intimidation. Cohart’s role is to make them feel like collectors from day one, confident in price, clear on provenance, and excited to share what they love.
The angle on AI: Practical, not performative
Cohart’s AI stance is refreshingly anti-hype. Instead of trying to generate art or chase fads, the team is embedding AI where it compounds value:
Artist copilot: Drafts newsletters, artwork descriptions, and show announcements, cleans up photos, even helps with short-form video edits, so creators spend less time on admin and more time creating.
Pricing & confidence: Uses real sales history and comps to guide fair pricing and surface trust on the product page (why is this $3,000 vs. $300?).
Personalized discovery: Image and text understanding to map a buyer’s taste and budget to the right artists and works, with social proof nudges like “5 people are viewing” or “2 editions left.”
Ops & safety: Moderation on DMs, basic identity checks, and scalable ingestion for those 10,000-work “white-glove” migrations that used to swallow a team of interns.
In Kendall’s words, AI isn’t the show, it’s the stage crew. It makes everything faster, clearer, and more consistent across the company, from investor updates to gallery outreach.
What’s next: Data-rich matching at scale
The roadmap is bold and grounded:
Discovery that works: Taste and budget onboarding, better ranking, and price transparency, so the “IKEA to auction house” gap finally has a confident middle lane.
Network effects with substance: Artists stick because Cohart helps them win (Release OS for drops, pricing guidance, clean invoicing), and buyers stick because discovery feels personal and trustworthy.
Selective monetization: Keep fees low where artists bring their own buyers, charge more where Cohart creates demand (boosts, financing, escrow, concierge shipping).
Cohart has also gone from hustling to be a tech sponsor to being pulled into top-tier fair conversations, a strong signal that the brand has product-market pull, not just pitch-deck polish.
Kendall Warson’s superpower: Focus
Plenty of founders can articulate a huge vision, fewer can sequence it. Kendall has steered Cohart through the classic marketplace maze, resisting the temptation to build everything for everyone, while keeping the company human, accessible, and, frankly, fun. She’s the first to admit the ride is a rollercoaster (scammers today, partnership wins tomorrow), but the operating mode is consistent, get the fundamentals right, then light the engine.
The vibe, distilled
Past: Experiments in social and commerce, learned the retention lesson, built tools that artists actually use.
Present: Subscription base growing, clean data foundation, trust features, operations getting automated, real momentum with fairs.
Future: A middle-market flywheel where matching is the product, AI is the invisible assist, and artists run their practices like modern SMBs.
Cohart’s north star is simple, make buying great art feel as natural as discovering a great song, while giving artists the operating system they’ve never had. Under Kendall Warson, they’re not just building a platform, they’re building the rails for the art world’s next chapter.
Read more from Dilan Abeya
Dilan Abeya, Mindset & Life Coach
Dilan Abeya in the founder of a company that builds Bespoke AI Persona's, having previously been an investment banker and model based in the UK. Abeya is also the founder of a mentoring company that uses an AI version of himself "AI DILAN" on its platform. He was born in London with Sri Lankan heritage. He did his schooling at the University of Leeds, gaining a joint honours degree in Japanese and Economics. Abeya has been credited as the UK's top model and financial personality by Entrepreneur and Forbes. He’s ex-JPM having started his career at Merrill Lynch as a trader, working in London and New York.
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