![Detours [Danny Pellegrino]](https://www.animationmagazine.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Detours_How-Do-I-Un-Remember-This.jpg "Detours_How Do I Un Remember This")
Artie, a commercial infrastructure company, announced its public launch today at the Sundance Film Festival this week. Led by former Google/YouTube executives Matt McDonald and Derek Scobie, Artie aims to bridge the gap between creative vision and financial reality.
As traditional studio models shift, Artie offers a solution for creators with big ideas — and often TV-sized audiences — but who lack the tools to fully realize their potential. By turning scripts, audience engagement and delivery data into standardized financial inputs, Artie prices projects and gives creators optimizing insights before a single frame is shot.
“At YouTube, we saw the power of democratizing distribution. Artie is about democratizing access to capital,” said McDonald, Artie’s CEO. “Every creator should be able to access the resources to get their project made — on their terms.”
Scobie, who serves as the new outfit’s CCO, added, “Artie provides an intelligence layer that gives brands and capital partners the confidence to back creators at the scale they deserve.”
Artie’s platform functions through a four-step process:
- Create: Optimize projects through development and packaging tools.
- Score: A proprietary engine generates robust predictions of audience reach and commercial value.
- Match: High-fidelity pairing between projects with aligned brands and capital partners.
- Verify: Track deliverables and ensure both sides are treated fairly and fulfilled quickly.
Artie is showcasing its initial product at Sundance through high-profile pilots including Detours, an animated short form series from podcaster Danny Pellegrino. The show is based on his bestselling debut book How Do I Un-Remember This and centers on the everyday chaos of a Midwest family in the 1990s.
According to Pellegrino’s Instagram, the project has been developed with the help of studio Princess Bento (Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy) and Drew Barrymore’s Flower Films. Georgia Kriss (Smiling Friends, Kitty Is Not a Cat) created the concept art.
