There Had to Be a Better Way

The Backstory

Early Inspiration

Back in 2018, Founder Eddie Davis had settled in Atlanta, GA and was lucky enough to decorate his home with the original artwork of generations of his family. At the same time, his daughter, Evie, was on the way and his father, a prolific painter, was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma.

A technologist at heart, Eddie used some nights and weekends time to build the personal art inventory management app he couldn’t find in the market (with a focus on capturing the stories of original art). Realizing how many artists struggled with maintaining a website, he connected that capability and made it available globally as ETChster, which now powers portfolios and connected websites for >15,000 artists globally.

Wow, Art-Related Tech Is Hardly Developed

While ETChster was still a passion project, Eddie was leading go-to-market for a ledger system/fintech competitor of QuickBooks and forging relationships with banks & credit unions across the country.

Many of them had remarkable and valuable art on display at their corporate headquarters as do many Atlanta companies such as Delta, Coca Cola, King & Spalding, Home Depot, and many financial system participants, but in most cases, there weren’t even labels.

The Aha Moment

Realizing works by Warhol, Picasso, and endless other collectible artists were not properly documented, not on the balance sheet, and not being exposed to the public (amazing free PR), Eddie put together a research team in 2024 to explore what it would take to help make life better art managers and help them share their amazing managed collections in more meaningful way.

Could the team create something elegant, intuitive, and robust at the same time?

Onward was born to make corporate/large art collection management simple and ensure incredible original art gets the attention it deserves.