For decades, African fine art has struggled with a quiet but costly problem: once an artwork is sold for the first time, its journey often ends there. Ownership records disappear, authenticity becomes harder to verify, and resale opportunities dry up.
Unlike Western art markets, where paintings by the likes of Picasso or Basquiat are resold for decades, steadily appreciating in value, African artworks frequently fade into private collections with little historical trace.
Atsur, founded in 2024 by Adaobi Orajiaku and Emediong Umoh, is positioning itself as the technology backbone to change that narrative. By combining verification systems, data research, and blockchain-backed record keeping, the startup is building an infrastructure that allows African artworks to be tracked, authenticated, and traded securely over time, enabling art to function not just as culture but as a long-term asset.
What Atsur does
At its core, Atsur is a technology platform designed to preserve African art history while enabling a functional secondary market for fine art.
“The mission is to preserve Africa’s art legacy,” Adaobi Orajiaku, co-founder of Atsur, says. “It’s putting our creative players in the fine arts industry at the forefront of the market. Our main problem is that we don’t have enough visibility into our records, and we can use technology to solve that.”
The startup verifies artworks and tracks their ownership lifecycle. Each verified piece is issued a certificate of authenticity, with detailed records of the artist, the original sale, and every subsequent transfer of ownership. This creates a permanent provenance trail, which is a critical component for trust, valuation, and resale in mature art markets.
Beyond individual artworks, Atsur also works with collectors and institutions to audit existing collections. The company researches older pieces, connects ownership histories, evaluates current market value, and ensures the right documentation is in place for insurance, resale, or legacy planning.
Its reach extends into the public sector as well. In 2024, Atsur partnered with Nigeria’s National Gallery of Art to document and archive artworks within the national collection, digitising records and rebuilding historical ownership data.
While Atsur integrates blockchain to preserve verified records in an immutable and privacy-conscious way, the platform is not a marketplace in the traditional sense. Instead, it acts as the infrastructure layer that enables secure transactions, asset tracking, and long-term value creation within the African art ecosystem.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
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From software engineering and art collection to building Atsur
Although a software engineer, Adaobi Orajiaku, had always been interested in the art world as an enthusiast and collector.
“I didn’t even realise I was being a collector,” Orajiaku explains. “I just loved being around art and supporting artists early.”
The idea for Atsur began to crystallise in 2022 while Orajiaku was leading a blockchain community focused on onboarding engineers into Web3. During the peak of the NFT boom, she and her peers frequently debated its long-term sustainability. While speculative digital art surged briefly, Orajiaku became convinced that real-world assets, particularly fine art, represented a more meaningful use case for blockchain technology.
Those discussions, combined with personal experience as a collector and conversations with artists and galleries, revealed a consistent problem: Africa lacked infrastructure for record keeping, provenance, and market visibility.
By 2023, the concept of Atsur was born. After months of research, industry interviews, and market testing, Orajiaku and Umoh formally launched the platform in May 2024, initially experimenting with a direct marketplace model before pivoting to focus on verification and infrastructure in mid-2025.
Since relaunching its pivoted product, Atsur has verified over 6,000 artworks, with archived pieces collectively valued at more than $300,000. Its internal research database, compiled from archives, institutions, and collectors, now contains millions of data points supporting provenance tracking across the ecosystem.
How Atsur works for artists, collectors, and institutions
Rather than listing artworks for public sale, Atsur functions as a verification and transaction backbone.
For artists and galleries, the process begins with identity verification and physical authentication of each artwork. Atsur confirms the creator’s credentials, examines the piece itself, and issues a digital certificate of authenticity. Once onboarded, the artwork enters Atsur’s tracking system.
When a collector purchases a verified piece, they can complete the transaction using a private sales link generated on the platform. Each sale automatically updates ownership records and issues a new certificate to the buyer. Over time, every transfer builds a transparent history, eliminating common issues such as lost receipts, disputed authenticity, and fraud.
For existing collectors, Atsur offers a collection audit service. The company researches older works, traces prior ownership where possible, assesses current valuation, and ensures documentation is complete. This not only improves resale confidence but also enables artworks to be insured or passed down as verifiable assets.
Behind the scenes, Atsur combines AI-powered data research with blockchain storage to preserve records permanently while protecting the owner’s privacy.
The business model
Atsur operates on a multi-stream revenue model centred around infrastructure services rather than direct art sales.
Artists and galleries pay a fixed fee to have each artwork verified and onboarded into Atsur’s tracking system. Afterwards, a certificate of authenticity would be issued.
In Nigeria, the current fee for each artwork is ₦75,000, a price designed to remain accessible while covering the intensive verification and documentation process.
While this creates predictable recurring revenue as more artworks enter the ecosystem and encourages early-stage artists to formalise their work’s provenance, it may still be expensive for emerging artists with lower-priced pieces and requires continuous market education on the value of verification.
For collectors with existing artworks, Atsur offers customised audit packages. Pricing varies based on the number of artworks, the age of each piece, the availability of existing records, and the level of historical research required.
Collections are tiered from lower-value works to high-value legacy pieces.
Additionally, when collectors use Atsur’s infrastructure to complete artwork transfers, the company earns a commission, typically around 3%, and 5% for higher-value transactions that require additional compliance checks.
Since July 2025, Atsur has generated over $7,000 in net revenue, operating largely through bootstrapping and organic growth.
Competitive advantage and the future of Atsur
According to Orajiaku, Atsur’s biggest advantage lies in its on-the-ground presence in Africa.
While most global art provenance companies focus on Western markets and high-value elite collections, Atsur is actively building infrastructure across African cities, visiting archives, collectors’ homes, galleries, and institutions to gather data that international players rarely access.
Its verification system is also deliberately democratised. Unlike closed networks that only accept high-value artworks, Atsur allows emerging and mid-level artists to authenticate and track their works, opening resale potential to a broader creative community.
This local-first, scalable model positions Atsur to expand beyond Nigeria into other African markets where art ecosystems face similar structural gaps.
On the growth front, the startup remains bootstrapped but has begun raising a pre-seed round in Q1 2026. It recently participated in the NBA Triple Double Accelerator, finishing among the top four startups out of over 700 applicants, and is currently part of the Carnegie Mellon incubation program.
With increasing traction among collectors, institutions, and artists, Atsur wants to become Africa’s core fine art infrastructure, transforming artworks into traceable assets.
