Auction houses, engineered.
We build the bidding floors of the internet. Sotheby's, Christie's and the storied houses of the last three centuries shaped how the world buys art, jewellery and collectibles. Our job is to build their digital-native successors — and the platforms culture-forward operators are using to compete with them.
We don't sell software. We build auction houses.
Auctions are theatre. They are a clock, a crowd, a reserve, an escrow and a thousand small product decisions about trust. We've spent a decade making those decisions — for hip-hop memorabilia at HipHopGrails, for celebrity drops, for high-value collectibles. Our reference architecture is now used as the spine of new auction houses across music, fashion, sport and luxury.
Reference deployment for HipHopGrails
C# domain services + minimal APIs
App Router + React 18
Row-level security, partitioning, audit
Azure SignalR real-time fan-out
Run-of-show tooling for event teams
The Sotheby's
of hip-hop.
The first auction destination of its kind for hip-hop memorabilia and celebrity drops. Often imitated, never matched. We designed the brand, engineered the platform end-to-end and run the live-event tooling for every drop.
Every layer of an
auction house, built.
Bidding engine
Server-authoritative bidding with anti-snipe, soft-close, proxy bids, reserve handling and absentee bids. Sub-100ms fan-out via Azure SignalR. Tested for live-event spikes at 10× normal load.
Live & timed formats
Timed auctions, live-streamed auctions with auctioneer paddle, drops and Buy-It-Now hybrids. Run-of-show tooling for event producers — pacing, holds, withdrawals, ad-hoc lots.
Consignment & seller ops
Workflows for labels, artists, estates, curators and resellers. Provenance, condition reports, lot-level photography and video, reserve negotiation, commission splits and post-sale settlement.
Identity, KYC & AML
Bidder identity verification, source-of-funds for high-value lots, sanctions screening and audit trails. Plug-in providers for jurisdiction-specific compliance.
Escrow, payments & payouts
Escrow with explicit hold periods, dispute windows and payout rails — Stripe Connect, ACH and specialist art-lending partners. Fully reconciled ledger built on PostgreSQL.
Authentication & provenance
Photo-grade lot record-keeping, condition history, third-party authentication hooks and tamper-evident provenance trails. Optional NFT certificates of authenticity per lot.
Native mobile apps
iOS and Android apps for bidders and ops — push notifications, deep-linked lot URLs, offline watch-list, biometric login. The same .NET API powers both surfaces.
Operator console
Catalog management, photography pipeline, scheduling, jackpots, loyalty, telemetry and CRM. Built so the ops team runs the platform — not the other way around.
Compliance & reporting
Auction-house grade audit trails, reportable events, tax reporting, GAAP-friendly revenue recognition. Designed for legal and finance teams from day one.
Four formats. One platform.
Timed online auction
- Anti-snipe extension windows
- Auto-bid (proxy) and absentee bids
- Soft-close per lot or session
Live-streamed auction
- Auctioneer paddle, room + online + phone bidders
- Real-time clerking and stand-in workflows
- Live HLS video, latency-aware bid floor
Drop & buy-now hybrid
- Scheduled drops with anti-bot capacity
- Buy-it-now with optional best offer
- Membership-gated early access
Sealed-bid & private sale
- Sealed-envelope mechanics
- Auctioneer-mediated negotiations
- Confidential consignment workflows
An auction-grade reference architecture.
App Service, Container Apps, SignalR, Service Bus, Storage, Front Door
Microservices, minimal APIs, MediatR, EF Core, FluentValidation
Bid fan-out, live-event sync, durable async workflows
Row-level security, partitioning by auction, pgvector for catalog search, full audit trail
App Router, server components, edge runtimes
Native modules where bidder UX demands it
OpenID Connect SSO, Stripe Connect, sanctions screening
Per-lot tracing, RTP-style live ops dashboards
We'll engineer it —
end to end.
Music. Sport. Fashion. Watches. Whisky. Memorabilia. If it goes under the hammer, we've probably already built the platform that runs it. Tell us what you're putting up for sale.