Online marketplace for high-end art and antiques, 1stDibs, has raised $50m to $60m from U.S. investors Insight Venture Partners to help buy founder Michael Bruno's shares, reports Fortune magazine. This values 1stDibs, with reportedly around 2,000 member dealers and a turnover of around $30m, at about $300m, and Bruno remains a ten percent shareholder. Deven Parekh, a managing director at Insight Venture Partners, has become a director of 1stdibs. Recent investors in 1stDibs include Alibaba the Chinese giant.
 
Founded in 2001 to showcase dealers from the Marché aux Puces, Paris, to New York buyers, the company now has a dominant global position in online antique marketplaces. It started as a listings site where transactions occurred offline but is now morphing into an ecommerce site where transactions are online and 1stDibs takes a cut.
 
Insight Venture Partners is a $13 billion U.S. private equity company specialising in internet business which has invested in Twitter, Tumblr, Hootsuite among others. The firm's executive advisory board has included Robert Rubin (chairman of Citigroup and 70th Secretary of the U.S. Treasury) and Steve Friedman (former chairman of the United States President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and former chairman of Goldman Sachs).
 
Insight Venture Partners is active globally with portfolio-company investments in 65 countries on six continents. 1stDibs operates in 17 countries.
 
Last year a snapshot appeared to show that around 40% of 1stdibs listings were for items valued from £1 to £5k and the website had 2m visits a month. This compared to SalvoWEB with 50% at £1k to £5k and 150,000 visits a month.