“Can a fine-art securitization platform scale to become the defining retail gateway into institutional-grade alternative asset investing?”
Founded in 2017, Masterworks pioneered the securitization of fine art, filing each artwork as a public SEC offering and selling fractional shares to retail investors. The company evolved from a niche alternative-asset experiment into a scaled platform with 800,000+ members and $900M AUM, operationalizing institutional-grade financial infrastructure (Modern Treasury for wire automation, J.P. Morgan for cross-border FX) to handle the volume and complexity of real-time art-share investing. Its embedded finance stack is purpose-built to handle investor onboarding, wire-based payouts, and multi-currency flows at scale rather than to resell financial products to third parties.
Masterworks runs its ledger on Modern Treasury.
Masterworks uses J.P. Morgan for FX and cross-border payouts.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 3 layers in Masterworks's stack: Ledger (Modern Treasury); FX & payouts (J.P. Morgan); Treasury (Modern Treasury).
Masterworks was founded by Scott Lynn and is founded in 2017, headquartered in 1 World Trade Center, 57th Floor, New York, NY 10007.
Masterworks has raised $110M+ in total (latest round: Series A, October 2021; valuation: $1B+ post-money (2021)).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against Masterworks and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.