PARIS, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Artmarket.com said its 120-page financial report for the six months ended June 30, 2026, has been made available to the public and filed with the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorité des marchés financiers, or AMF). The report is available through Artprice.com and Actusnews. Half-year filings of this kind are a standard obligation for French-listed companies, and they give outside investors a consolidated mid-year view of both finances and strategy.

The company said the launch of Artprice News produced significant coverage, indexing and search-engine optimization results, particularly in Google AI Overview. According to the company, Google data indicates that, depending on the country, vertical queries in Google AI Overview represent 75% to 85% of searches associated with new customers. For a subscription data business, those figures underline a shift in discovery: potential customers increasingly encounter specialized providers inside AI-generated answers rather than on conventional result pages.

Artmarket.com attributed the results to a global campaign aimed at attracting readers and customers seeking real-time art-market news and event calendars. It said Artprice News is now carried throughout the art press, whose publication frequency is generally no more than weekly. The editorial team also produced more than 3,500 multilingual news reports, incorporating exclusive data from the company’s Econometrics Department. Artmarket.com said this activity generated search-engine responses and Google Alerts on a large scale.

As of June 30, 2026, shareholders’ equity was €30.826 million. Artprice said it owns the world’s largest physical collection of auction catalogs and manuscripts dating from 1700 to the present. The collection was most recently appraised at €42 million in January 2025.

The company said its documentary collection, described as a “Library of Alexandria,” together with its Intuitive Artmarket® AI system, could allow the volume of its globally unique data to increase by a factor of 25 to 30 between 2026 and 2030 without increasing expenses, which consist primarily of personnel costs. Artmarket.com said the expansion is intended to support organic revenue growth.

Artmarket.com said its average workforce has remained at 49 employees through industrial processes developed over several years. With Artprice Images® and Intuitive Artmarket®, total expenses are expected to remain virtually unchanged from 2025 levels up to revenue of €90 million, notably through the use of proprietary AI and without bond financing.

The company said it has never carried out a capital increase, apart from previous exercises of stock options reserved for employees. According to Artmarket.com, this reflects the stated commitment of its Board of Directors and Founder, Chairman and CEO, thierry Ehrmann, to avoid dilution of shareholders’ holdings or a weakening of the share price.

Groupe Serveur, Artmarket.com’s founding shareholder, holds 30.16% of the share capital and 45.78% of voting rights, excluding the Ehrmann family’s holdings. Artmarket.com said no shares had been sold since 2015, a period of 10 years, describing this as evidence of thierry Ehrmann’s confidence in and commitment to the company’s stock.

The company referred to its second-quarter 2026 press release, published on Aug. 13, 2026, under the headline “Artmarket.com: Q2 2026 Growth, From Artprice’s Gradual Transition to Its ‘AI-FIRST’ Transformation.” It said thierry Ehrmann, his family and Groupe Serveur are increasing their holdings through additional purchases of Artmarket.com shares. The company said all required disclosures are filed with the AMF and published online within statutory deadlines, and that purchases are made during permitted trading windows.

Artmarket.com said the transactions are intended to reaffirm the Ehrmann family’s and Groupe Serveur’s confidence in Artprice by Artmarket.com and to support the company. It said the purchases are not intended to lead to a public takeover offer or public buyout offer (OPA/OPR), contrary to interpretations circulating on certain forums.

The company also rejected suggestions that the Ehrmann family had failed to make required share-purchase or ownership-threshold disclosures. It identified the AMF’s ONDE extranet (Outil de notification et de déclaration électronique, or Electronic Notification and Disclosure Tool) as the secure platform used for disclosures involving directors’ and executives’ transactions, ownership-threshold crossings and other notifications.

The disclosures cited by the company are:

• First disclosure, No. 2026DD1133787, published Aug. 17, 2026.
• Second disclosure, No. 2026DD1134265, published Aug. 20, 2026.
• Third, supplementary disclosure, No. 2026DD1134267, published Aug. 20, 2026.

Nadège EHRMANN, a member of Artmarket.com’s Board of Directors, sought to acquire additional shares. The company said that, because the aggregate value of her purchases exceeded the regulatory threshold, she made the required disclosures to the issuer and the AMF under Article 19 of the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). MAR notifications are public, which lets outside shareholders verify insider transactions through the regulator’s records rather than relying on company statements alone. Artmarket.com added that share purchases normally follow movements in the share price, but that such movements have not changed the Ehrmann family’s determination to increase its stake.

Artprice by Artmarket has received the French government’s “Innovative Company” designation from BPI (Banque publique d’investissement, France’s public investment bank) on several occasions. The company said it devotes 80% of its resources each year to research and development and to creating value through new databases. It added that thierry Ehrmann remains its largest shareholder through Groupe Serveur, which it described as a fundamental criterion cited by Warren Buffett and many European investment funds.

The company said AI data centers have become a sensitive issue because of their energy consumption. Artprice by Artmarket has developed hardware and software processes and a clean-room architecture that it says improve energy efficiency. According to the company, at equivalent computing power, its energy consumption decreases by 18% each year. For AI operators, energy efficiency has become a competitive metric alongside raw computing power. It referred to Artmarket.com’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report and said Groupe Serveur, an Internet pioneer founded in 1987, has followed the same approach for 39 years.

Artprice by Artmarket was founded in 1997 and said it anticipated the digital transformation of the art market. The company identified auction houses, galleries, experts, museums, fairs and exhibitions among the market participants affected by that transformation. It said leading auction houses, including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams, have stated that they will reach their end-of-2030 targets for the transition to online operations in 2027, three years ahead of those targets.

Artmarket.com said online auctions and increased time spent at home have increased the need for independent and reliable art-market data. It cited market studies and reports estimating that more than 180 million people buy art online across all continents. During the first half of 2026, Artprice by Artmarket recorded what it described as the highest number of lots sold in the history of worldwide auctions, according to the Artprice 2026 Art Market Report.

The company said it adds more than 1.2 million records to its databases each year. The records are enriched through 112 referential-integrity fields and include current-year entries and historical data. Artprice Images adds more than 3 million very-high-resolution photographs, although Artmarket.com said these enhancements are not fully reflected in its recorded assets.

AI systems and technology strategy

Artmarket.com said its Board of Directors, founder and employees are committing their resources to AI. In a statement attributed to thierry Ehrmann, the company said it had reassessed its position regarding Perplexity because of the rapid development of AI engines.

The statement identified OpenAI with ChatGPT 6; Google with the DeepMind ecosystem, Gemini Ultra and Project Astra; and Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Mistral, Qwen, Copilot and Meta as major players. It said these alternatives are becoming more relevant to Artprice customers’ expectations and that Perplexity’s original innovation—searching the web in natural language and returning source-supported answers—has become a feature expected from competing services.

The statement noted that ChatGPT introduced its own search capability in October 2024, while Google developed AI Mode and strengthened the connection between synthesized answers and conversational search through Overview. It said that when a feature that once differentiated a company becomes commonplace, subsequent improvements attract less attention. It also cited distribution, relations with content creators and the media, changing commercial terms, licensing costs and volatility in the price of AI tokens as challenges for AI providers and customers.

Artprice said it requires stable relationships with technology partners and does not intend to pass monthly price increases on to subscribers, while continuing to monitor the development and stabilization of AI technologies.

Artprice by Artmarket describes AI as a revolution “more significant than the smartphone and the Internet.” The company referred to the “AI-First” strategies of GAFAM—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. It also cited Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, as saying that major database publishers with proprietary vertical AI, including Artprice, will dominate the S&P 500 in 2030. Oracle was described as the world leader in database software, with a market capitalization of €414.98 billion.

For fiscal 2026/2027, Artprice by Artmarket is seeking the “Innovative Company” designation from BPI for the third consecutive time. The application is supported by development of a proprietary AI system integrated into Intuitive Artmarket® and Blind Spot®.

The company said its AI economy strategy rests on five pillars: big data, deep learning, data mining, proprietary algorithms and a business built around rigorously verified information standardized throughout the production process. Artmarket.com said it owns the intellectual property associated with these pillars, including copyrights and related rights covering its algorithms, databases, big data, machine learning and neural networks.

A late-2024 study commissioned by Artprice ranked the company as the “top-of-mind” art-market database. Artmarket.com said Google, Gemini and OpenAI also confirm Artprice as a global reference for art-market databases. In a survey conducted at the International Committee of the History of Art congress, 325 of 378 participants, or 86%, named Artprice first when asked which art-market databases they knew.

Data, customers and art-market applications

Artprice by Artmarket said it has held a leading position in the global art-information market for 29 years. According to the company, its infrastructure processes 55 megabytes of data per second per employee, more than 25 times European averages, based on a Mazars audit.

Its databases contain more than 918,000 artists and more than 30 million auction results covering three centuries of art history from 1700. The information is enriched by 212 million images and managed through partnerships with 7,200 auction houses worldwide. The physical collection includes 212 million artwork, including 21 million images tokenized by art historians.

Artprice said it subscribes to AI engines and maintains maximum usage capacity on practically every AI platform available in the market. The monitoring program is led by thierry Ehrmann, whom the company describes as an AI specialist since 1987, with support from its IT teams.

Artmarket.com cited an analysis estimating that the AI-in-art market will grow from $212 million in 2022 to $5.8 billion in 2032, representing annual growth of 40.5%.

The company’s customers include fine-art experts, auction-house directors, private and institutional collectors, art historians, cultural institutions, museum curators, researchers and academics specializing in the art market. Artmarket.com said the market’s complex information—including artwork histories, trends, auction data, critical analysis, artist biographies and socioeconomic contexts—requires advanced research and analytical tools.

The company also cited the emergence of new collectors, including 44% new buyers in 2025 according to gallery reports, the rise of AI-generated art and the growing digital integration of sales methods. It said these developments create information needs that combine human expertise with AI.

Artmarket.com cited 17% sales growth among dealers with revenue below $250,000 and increased auction sales of works priced below $5,000 as indicators of a broader move toward a more accessible art market.

“Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI”

The company said thierry Ehrmann’s 1,800-page work, “Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI,” has become the foundation for comparative evaluations of long-form readings and critiques produced by ChatGPT 6, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Mistral, Qwen, Copilot and Meta. The project is described at dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en/meta-reading.

Artprice said the work is freely available online as a 4.5 MB raw typescript and has reached 21.9 million English-language downloads, according to initial certified distribution data. The work has reached 123 countries in 16 languages and dialects through Artprice’s distribution partners and PR Newswire/Cision. It is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. The English-language website is available at dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en.

The company said nearly 30% of the book covers Artprice’s history from 1991 to the present, including its relationships with Enrique Mayer, the Mireur, Thomas Bayer, Peter Hastings Falk and Wan Jie. A print edition is scheduled for late October in English and French. Artmarket.com said a Simplified Chinese edition will likely be printed and distributed in China by its state-affiliated partner Artron, while digital distribution through WeChat, which the company described as having 1.43 billion active users, has expanded in China.

The project is based at La Demeure du Chaos, also called the Abode of Chaos, Artprice’s headquarters. The company said the initiative emphasizes human responsibility, including the author’s intellectual direction, choices and oversight. It also proposes a reproducible framework for testing AI systems across successive versions.

Artmarket.com said literary evaluation differs from binary knowledge, mathematics and programming benchmarks because it involves continuity of voice, coherence, shifts in meaning and interpretation. Its proposed benchmark would compare model versions against a common task set, add new texts and use unpublished tests to reduce the risk of measuring familiarity with previously circulated material.

The company said its library of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, auction catalogs and art books could support tests involving attribution histories, source and commentary distinctions, historical descriptions, vocabulary changes and unsupported connections. Results would require domain-specific evaluation.

AI-First transformation

Artmarket.com said it is moving away from gradually introducing AI modules into long-established databases. The company described the new approach as a comprehensive transformation intended to make AI the primary framework of its platform rather than an optional component.

The company said the change may result in a marginal adjustment to its public deployment timeline but will not affect its financial trajectory. It cited steady revenue growth despite geopolitical tensions and volatile energy costs, saying this financial position allows it to prioritize operational preparation over speed. The sequencing places the weight of near-term evidence on the subscriber platform’s eventual launch, since the internal build-out produces few externally visible milestones.

The first stage is internal. Artprice’s heritage includes nearly 180 proprietary databases connected through a meta-database and a documentary collection of manuscripts and auction catalogs dating from 1700. Artmarket.com said every employee, department and production unit is being equipped with dedicated AI hardware and appliances. Data collection, standardization and enrichment pipelines are being rewritten for deep learning and proprietary algorithms.

The subscriber platform will be delivered after the internal value chain has been calibrated. It is intended to be a complete “AI-First” environment built on certified large-scale data, deep learning and algorithmic security.

Artmarket.com cited Gartner Group and Europol Innovation Lab as estimating that 70% of Internet data was uncontrollable synthetic data as of June 30, 2026. The company said organizations controlling their entire data value chains can protect the provenance of their information and train AI systems on tens of millions of unique records.

The company characterizes the development of Intuitive Art Market® and Blind Spot® as an “ontological transformation,” meaning a change in the system’s fundamental nature rather than only its form or performance. It said the transformation would move Artprice from an information repository to a cognitive architecture, make data a dynamic semantic matrix and provide control of the industrial chain from proprietary raw data to the vertical language model.

Artmarket.com said vertical AI could turn indexed data into decision intelligence, support autonomous Artprice agents and provide access to historical, certified and nonreplicable information. It cited annual subscription pricing of €1,600 to €2,500 and said future access models could include predictive APIs and inference systems integrated into institutional workflows.

The company also described a feedback loop in which and analyses by users enrich metadata and refine the system. It said the premium offering is intended to conceal algorithmic complexity behind a simple user experience. The system is expected to operate in more than 40 languages while preserving artwork titles in their original nomenclature.

Artmarket.com said the strategy could create new professional opportunities while maintaining the importance of traditional art education. It also said its work at La Demeure du Chaos and France’s official recognition of the site as a “total work of art” could support future collaboration in sovereign AI and other specialized fields.

Company information

Artmarket.com is listed on Eurolist by Euronext Paris. Its identifiers are Euroclear 7478, Bloomberg PRC and Reuters ARTF. The company said the latest TPI analysis includes more than 18,000 individual shareholders, excluding foreign shareholders, companies, banks, FCPs and UCITS.

Artmarket.com and its Artprice department were founded in 1997 by thierry Ehrmann and are controlled by Groupe Serveur, created in 1987. Artmarket.com said its databases contain more than 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 918,800 artists. Artprice Images® provides access to 181 million digital images of photographs or engraved reproductions of artworks from 1700 to the present, accompanied by commentary from art historians.

The company said it receives data from 7,200 auction houses and publishes art-market trends through agencies and press titles in 121 countries and 11 languages. It has 9.3 million members and operates a standardized marketplace for fixed-price art sales.

Related company information is available through the 2025 Global Art Market Annual Report, the 2025 Contemporary Art Market Report, and the Artmarket press-release archive. The company also publishes information through Facebook, X and X.

The company’s econometrics department can be contacted at econometrics@artprice.com. Information about demonstrations is available at artprice.com/demo, and subscription information is available at artprice.com/subscription. Artmarket.com’s contact address is ir@artmarket.com.

Source: Artmarket.com