About SeeMe
Artists deserve a direct path to prosperity.
SeeMe helps ambitious artists get discovered, grow their economic opportunities, and connect with their communities, their followers and their patrons... the people who believe in their work.
WHAT WE BUILT
We Are Building The World’s First Direct-to-Consumer Artist and Art Platform
We are the world’s first direct-to-consumer artist and art platform. Musicians got Spotify, writers got Substack. Artists get SeeMe. The SeeMe platform is a combination of LinkedIn, Patreon, and Squarespace - all custom made for artists and bolted together in a way that provides artists community and tremendous value and synergy - every part works better together than apart.
What We Will Become
We we aiming to become the Spotify of the art world - 5 million artists and 50 million art enthusiasts coming together through their love of art. (Except that our split for artists will remain the best in the industry and they will retain a fair share.)
Our History With Artists
Over the past years we have established ourselves in the art world, helping artists through grants, awards and exhibitions.
$1.5M+ awarded
Distributed directly to working artists in grants & awards.
Louvre/White House shows
Exhibitions mounted from NYC & Miami to The Louvre in Paris & The White House.
10M+ Artists Served
Ambitious living artists globally building a path to prosperity.
Our Manifesto
Technology brought musicians and writers closer to their audiences, creating new paths to discovery, independence, and income. Visual art was left behind. Galleries remain vital partners, but there are too few to serve a growing global community of artists. Social platforms reward attention, not sustainable careers. Personal websites demand time, technical skill, marketing, and ad spend-with no guarantee of discovery or sales.
Continue reading...
01
The Last Creator Frontier
Visual Art is the last creator-driven industry that has not been positively impacted by technology - until now.
Over the past 25 years, every major creative field—from music to publishing—has been reinvented by tools and distribution channels that bring creators directly to their audiences.
Companies like Spotify, Substack, and Patreon have generated hundreds of billions of dollars in economic value and delivered it straight to the creators. That revolution hasn’t happened for visual art—until now. SeeMe is driving this innovation, creating a direct path to prosperity for artists while fostering personal connections with fans, followers, and collectors.
Music
Reinvented
Publishing
Reinvented
Visual art
SeeMe is Reinventing
02
The Structural Crisis (<1% making $100k)
10M+
Living artists globally
<1%
Earn over $100k/year from making art
~5%
Have gallery representation
Gallery representation / 100 artists
5 highlighted dots = about 5% of artists have gallery representation.
There are well over 10 million ambitious living artists globally, yet the traditional industry serves less than 1%. Fewer than 1% earn over $100,000 annually from making art, and only about 5% have gallery representation.
Historically, galleries were the foundation and connective tissue of the art world, nurturing talent and guiding new collectors. But over the past 25 years—while the global economy grew over 200%—the gallery network remained flat. As the number of working artists exploded, traditional opportunities shrank.
03
The Illusion of Instagram & DIY Websites
While artists today have access to Instagram and personal websites, these tools are time-consuming, expensive, and generally ineffective for building a sustainable business:
The Instagram Trap
Popularity does not
equal revenue.
Discovery is poor, e-commerce is weak, and constant algorithm shifts make reach fleeting. Most importantly, popularity does not equal revenue.
Poor discovery / weak e-commerce
Fleeting reach / shifting algorithms
The Website Burden
Hours of admin.
No guarantee of sales.
Managing a DIY website is technically daunting and requires endless marketing, ad spend, and SEO effort—hours of admin work that rarely guarantee sales.
Technical upkeep / endless marketing
Ad spend / SEO / time away from art
04
Going Direct—On Your Own Terms
Not around the art world, but through it, on their own terms.
At SeeMe, we are building a new paradigm for the visual art industry. We exist to help artists go direct: to their audience, to their collectors, and to the true economic value their work creates.
We work alongside gallery advisors, gallerists, and curators. In many cases, we discover artists first and help them find the right gallery representation. Artists come to SeeMe for what the software platform can do—they stay for what the global community brings.
A direct path, within the art world
Artist
Work & practice
→
SeeMe
Platform & community
→
Audience / Collectors
Connection & economic value
Working alongside
Gallery advisors / Gallerists / Curators
community
Artists Come to SeeMe for the Platform.
They Stay for the Community.
A global network of working artists and the collectors, patrons, and enthusiasts who believe in them, connected directly, supporting each other financially and creatively, online and in person.
Community is Our Deepest Conviction
Community is our deepest conviction, and increasingly the one that matters most. As the world grows more digital and more divided, the case for showing up for each other grows stronger, not weaker. SeeMe is about seeing. Really seeing. Listening. Caring. Investing in living artists.
Meet the EXECUTIVE Team
Meet the team making this happen
We are a multidisciplinary group of artists, curators, designers and developers working together to create a platform where creators can build their careers, own their relationships, and share in the value they create.
Brendan Burns
Chief Executive Officer, Founder
Brendan Burns is CEO/co-founder of SeeMe and a serial entrepreneur (three exits) with deep experience building marketplace businesses in fragmented industries. He previously built several VC companies (two exits) and turned around and sold an art e-commerce company. Brendan is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School and a strategic advisor to Sotheby’s Institute. He acquired and repositioned SeeMe to build the first creator platform for visual artists (like Substack) and has led growth across 15K unique artist submissions/data sets, 450K social followers, and 35+ hybrid exhibitions, bringing founder-market fit across art, community, distribution, fundraising, and strategy.
Paul Niemczyk
Chief Product Officer, Co-Founder
Paul Niemczyk is CPO/CTO and co-founder, responsible for building the SeeMe platform and technology. He was most recently a product executive at Google working on Gemini and AI infrastructure. He has deep background in building and shipping AI/ML products, both infrastructure and products based on AI/ML in both B2C and B2B contexts. He has been a lead at two prior start-ups with exits. Paul is an art and music lover and has a personal mission in seeing art and artists flourish and succeed.
Nerissa Bardfeld
Co-Founder Chief Curator
Nerissa Bardfeld is SeeMe's Chief Curator and co-founder, bringing deep experience across gallery direction, exhibition design, and program development. At SeeMe, she focuses on developing artist-facing programming, organizing SeeMe’s global exhibitions, and expanding audience engagement with new collectors. Her background spans museums, galleries, schools, health/wellness venues, and both physical and digital platforms. She also has experience developing cross-disciplinary graduate programs in design thinking and entrepreneurship, giving SeeMe strong art-world, curation, user-experience, and collector-engagement expertise.