OnceHeld

The Opportunity

Musicians, artists, and estates manage thousands of valuable items — instruments, costumes, equipment, archives — with no proper tooling. Spreadsheets lose provenance. Generic asset trackers can't handle the relationships. Legacy archive systems are stuck in the 90s. And when artists are on tour, the items move constantly: between venues, between custody, across borders.

The Solution

As founding engineer and CTO, I built OnceHeld as a specialised platform around the domain — provenance chains, condition histories, multi-facility tracking, valuation audits, and full digital + physical archiving in one place. It's now in live use by major artists running their archiving and asset tracking through it on world tours, and the company has closed its seed round on the strength of the working product.

Impact

• On world tours with major artists — Live, daily use managing real collections in motion
• Seed-funded — Investment closed off the back of the platform
• Digital + physical archiving in one place — Replaces spreadsheets, archive software, and asset trackers with a single source of truth
• Audit-ready provenance — Ownership chains, custody transfers, and time-travel queries for any item

Technical Approach

Provenance modeling with bidirectional relationships - items can be split, merged, or grouped. Audit-ready documentation for authentication.

Time-travel queries via trigger-based change capture to separate history table. Field-level tracking required for insurance claims and legal disputes.

Flexible schema design using JSON-based custom fields searchable across all field types. PostgreSQL full-text search with GIN indexes over Elasticsearch complexity.

Auth via NextAuth with magic links - estates have non-technical users who need frictionless access.

This project demonstrates my approach to complex domain problems: not every problem is CRUD. Some need careful entity design, enterprise patterns, and technical pragmatism.