About Artalytics

The company, the founder, and the thesis

Artalytics in one sentence

Artalytics is the single source of truth for authenticated digital fine art — the “GitHub for digital art.” The metrics framework on this site is one pillar of that platform: it quantifies the creation process itself so that digital artwork can become a defensible, valuation-ready asset class.

The thesis

Twelve thousand surgeons taught me that any skilled human practice produces a measurable signal.

I spent four years at Intuitive Surgical as the first cross-functional data-science hire on surgical robotic telemetry, analyzing data from nearly a million operations spanning twenty years. The finding that shaped the rest of my career: a surgeon’s learning trajectory could be read directly from the motion patterns of their instruments. That finding became the foundation of global efforts to quantify surgeon expertise for training and credentialing programs, and it won the top company-wide award across 150 project teams and 400 employees considered.

The Artalytics thesis is the same observation applied to a different domain. A painting is made stroke-by-stroke, color-by-color, decision-by-decision — and in the digital era, every one of those decisions is already captured inside the canvas file. The art market has simply never used the data that’s sitting there.

Artalytics is the platform that does.

How Artalytics started

The short version: I ran into the fraud problem as a creator.

I had an artist background growing up but hadn’t practiced seriously in nearly a decade by the time I was at Happy Cabbage. During the pandemic (roughly 2020–2021), while still at the company, I started drawing again. When I exited Happy Cabbage at the end of 2022, I took the next year as an art year — no code, no company, just practice.

I gravitated toward hyper-realistic portrait work and began posting creation-process videos to TikTok. Hyper-realistic digital art turns out to be an unusual format for a public feed: people watch the image assemble over hours, and the creation itself becomes the content.

Part of what drove the audience growth was a learning curve visible in real time. My early completed pieces took about four hours each; within a year I was routinely spending 70+ hours on a single portrait. Followers watched the skill climb alongside each new work. By the end of 2024 I had built an audience of roughly 22,000 followers that way.

When I started paying attention to NFT monetization, I ran headlong into the dysfunction in the digital art market. Most open NFT platforms are dominated by fraud and plagiarism — buyers cannot easily distinguish a human-made original from a copy, and they know it. The curated alternatives that attempt to solve this by committee review don’t scale and are closed to new artists. Hyper-realistic work is especially vulnerable: the visual output is exactly what AI image generation and copycats can most easily imitate.

So I went back to my canvas files.

A Procreate save file (.procreate) is a zip archive, and it is far richer than most people realize. Every stroke, every color decision, every timing pattern across the entire creation is captured inside it. The full creation process is sitting there, waiting to be read.

And I recognized the pattern. The data inside a canvas file is structurally similar to what I’d spent years extracting from surgical robotic telemetry at Intuitive Surgical — a skilled practitioner improving over time, with every decision along the way captured. My own learning curve, running in public on TikTok, was the same class of signal I’d once read off twelve thousand surgeons’ instrument motion. The analytical lens transferred.

If you expose that data as an authenticated source of truth — permanently tied to the creator — you can prove an artwork was made by a human, quantify the creator’s skill across their body of work, and give collectors something objective to value.

That’s Artalytics. The metrics framework on this site is the quantify-performance pillar of that vision. The broader platform — PixelTrace authentication, Certificates of Authenticity, and the interactive verified-artwork experience at artalytics.app — is the rest.

I’ve spent roughly two years on Artalytics — the first year concepting and building the MVP, the second expanding the framework and shipping the public documentation.

Founder — Bobby Fatemi

I’m a data scientist and a working digital artist. Artalytics is what happens when those two practices converge into one company.

Before Artalytics

Happy Cabbage Analytics (2019–2023) — Cofounder and CTO / Head of Data Science. I architected the data infrastructure end-to-end — ETL pipelines, backend systems, retail-facing product — and managed a team of four, growing the company from three cofounders to twenty full-time employees and a $25M post-money valuation by 2023. By the time I exited, the platform had ingested more than a billion retail transactions from 28 million distinct customers across 300 retail organizations, driven 130% year-over-year subscription growth, held a 90% client retention rate, and reached $1M in annual revenue. Happy Cabbage continues to operate under Andrew Watson (CEO) and Ryan Herron (CRO); company site at happycabbage.io.

Intuitive Surgical (2015–2019) — Data Scientist, Medical Devices & Robotics. First cross-functional data-science hire on surgical robotic telemetry, with a mandate to find value inside petabytes of surgical-system data capturing nearly a million operations performed by 12,000 surgeons dating back to 1990. I built the learning-curve models that became the foundation for global surgeon credentialing and training programs. Received the company’s top annual award — 1st place for most outstanding and impactful work across 150 project teams and 400 employees considered.

Analysis Group (2013–2015) — Senior Analyst, Economic Consulting. Built forecasting and budget-impact models for major pharmaceutical companies (including experimental oncology treatments under FDA consideration and Markov-model cohort analysis for a Schizophrenia diagnostic). Performed expert analysis in multi-billion-dollar intellectual-property, tax, and finance litigation — including a 4-billion-line code-reuse analysis in a multi-billion-dollar tax dispute and a first-of-its-kind laser-eye tracking experiment designed for the successful defense in a $2B patent-infringement suit. Authored the fixed-panel regression analysis of Google Fiber’s local-economy impact that was published and cited by national news organizations.

Education

Santa Clara University (2009–2013) — Triple major, graduated Magna Cum Laude in both degrees.

  • B.A. Finance, Leavey School of Business (GPA 3.95). Received the Outstanding Student in Finance award.
  • B.S. Computer Science & Mathematics, College of Arts & Sciences (GPA 3.79).

Co-authored Financial Derivatives and Bank Recapitalization with Dr. George Chacko. Authored The Students’ Guide to Using R, a 52-page manual published under Creative Commons and used by the full SCU Economics major program.

Art practice

b_fatemi_art — hyper-realistic portrait work on Instagram and YouTube; creation-process videos as @fatemi.art on TikTok (~22K followers). The first 5,000+ hours of verified drawing time on the Artalytics platform are my own.

Where things stand

Artalytics today runs:

  • PixelTrace — the proprietary authentication and metrics engine, working as a production-capable prototype and processing submissions today.
  • The metrics framework — three dimensions (Time & Effort, Skill & Artistry, Complexity & Detail), each built from five proprietary metric families and scored relative to the artist’s portfolio. Public pages document the foundation; private pages contain the full metric set for qualified review.
  • certificates.art — a public registry issuing blockchain-backed Certificates of Authenticity for every verified artwork.
  • The platform at artalytics.app — interactive galleries, analytical timelapse replays, AI-powered contextualization, and the full verified-artwork experience.

The initial validation corpus is my own portfolio — approximately 50 authenticated works representing over 5,000 hours of drawing time. Validation studies beyond that are dataset-gated: they require public artist portfolios (bootstrap targets identified) or partnership data (candidate partners identified across galleries, auction houses, wealth managers, and art-lending desks). Those studies are specified in detail in the Validation Framework.

I am the only full-time person on Artalytics today. A pre-seed round is in active development — target $300K–$500K — to fund the partnership work, the external validation studies, and the first four hires: Chief Technology Officer, Lead Data Scientist, Business Development, and Customer Success.

Connect