Recovery
The stolen
Works taken from museums, churches, homes and heritage sites, listed in public registries and waiting to resurface.
✦ Private Briefing · By Invitation
The record ends. The search doesn’t.
Found in fragments in 1863 and rebuilt piece by piece, she has never recovered her head or arms. Algorizma uses AI-assisted visual research to trace stolen and lost works of art, from looted antiquities to forgotten masterpieces hanging in ordinary rooms.
Our motto, in Arabic, Latin and English: نبحث عمّا فُقِد. Quaerimus quod amissum est. We seek what has been lost.
II The Lost Record
Masterpieces do not vanish. Their records do.
Some were cut from their frames. Others were simply forgotten: misattributed, inherited, hung in a hallway for a century. None of them ceased to exist. The trail is there. It is simply too vast, too scattered and too multilingual for any human team to read.
Today, finding them depends on a handful of specialists and a great deal of luck. Cases stay open for decades. Masterpieces sell for the price of decoration.
- 50,000+
- works listed in INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database
- 13
- works taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, including Vermeer’s The Concert. None has been recovered.
- $10M
- reward offered for information leading to their return
- €24M
- paid at auction for Cimabue’s Christ Mocked, found in 2019 hanging in a kitchen in northern France
III Method
Four disciplines. One continuous trail.
What once took a career of expertise and a lifetime of luck, Algorizma compresses into a single, repeatable investigation.
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I
The Dossier
Every search begins with what is known: images, dimensions, provenance and the last confirmed sighting, assembled into one complete record of the missing work.
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II
The Wide Reading
The engine reads across publicly available sources, in many languages and at a scale no human team could match.
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III
The Resemblance
Proprietary visual analysis surfaces candidates that resemble the work, even when cropped, reframed, restored or poorly photographed.
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IV
The Lead File
Every candidate is ranked, documented and reviewed by a person. Leads go to rightful owners, insurers or the proper authorities, never to the public.
Rediscovery
The forgotten
Lost works by the masters, sitting unrecognised in attics, kitchens and provincial salerooms, often valued at a fraction of their worth.
IV The Case File
An open case. A sealed file.
Our first investigation is underway. Its findings name places, sources and possibilities that cannot responsibly be published.
The complete Case File is opened only for committed patrons and investors, in private session and under confidentiality.
Case No. 001
Confidential
- Subject
- Last seen
- Sources read
- Candidates
- Status
- Open · Active
Disclosed only under confidentiality
V Why Privately
Stolen works move when attention turns toward them.
A public launch would alert the very people holding them, and invite careless imitators into a field where one clumsy search can drive a masterpiece underground for another generation.
In the search for forgotten masterpieces, the advantage belongs to whoever sees first. That advantage disappears the moment the method becomes common knowledge.
So before anything is announced, we are speaking with a small circle of patrons and investors, privately, by invitation.
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i
Lawful channels
Leads go to rightful owners, insurers and the proper authorities. We never act on a work ourselves.
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ii
Human judgement
Every lead is reviewed by a person before it leaves the house. The engine suggests; people decide.
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iii
Discretion
Cases, sources and findings are never published. Each engagement is reviewed against the laws of every country involved.
VI The Founder
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4. Replace [Your Name] in the alt text with your name.
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[Your Name]
Founder · Algorizma
[Your story: two or three sentences on why lost art matters to you, and what moment started this.]
[Your background: what you have built or studied that makes you the person to do this.]
The first commission
Investigative art journalists
The seed round funds our first specialist hires: investigators who verify every lead before it leaves the house, and who know how the art world really moves.
Advisor
[Advisor Name]
[One line: who they are and why they matter.]
VII The Programme
Where we stand. Where we are going.
Where we stand
A working prototype engine that generates investigative leads from public registries and sources.
Use of the seed round
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Custom database & data acquisition40%
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Dedicated hardware & compute25%
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Investigative art journalists25%
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Legal, compliance & operations10%
Twelve months
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Months 0–3
Custom database foundation. Dedicated hardware. Wider source coverage.
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Months 3–6
First investigative art journalist hired. First verified lead files delivered.
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Months 6–12
A pilot with an insurer, auction house or recovery partner. Preparation for the next, larger round.
How value returns
Recovery fees
A share of the value recovered, as is customary in the field.
Provenance checks
Licensed screening for auction houses, dealers and collectors before a work changes hands.
Rediscovery
Finder’s and advisory fees on unrecognised works, and first sight for our partners.
Private commissions
Dedicated investigations for families, institutions and governments seeking specific works or heritage.
VIII Correspondence
An invitation to the founding circle.
Seed round
$100,000 – $150,000
Larger commitments are welcomed and discussed privately. The founding circle is deliberately small.
For those who support the search itself
Founding Patron
- Named among the founding patrons, with your permission
- Private briefings on every active case
- Invitation to the first recovery or rediscovery
For those who seek a stake in the outcome
Founding Investor
- Equity participation in Algorizma
- Full Case File access, under confidentiality
- Quarterly private reports
- Minimum commitment $25,000
Some works have waited centuries.
They will not wait for a public announcement.