Company
Bernard builds AI diligence for private-asset decisions.
Based in New York and founded by Timothy Kompanchenko and Kiki Tovey, Bernard is built around evidence, judgment, and records that need to hold up.
Preserve the basis for judgment.
Our work is about keeping the record of a decision intact: what was claimed, what evidence supported it, where confidence was strong, and where contradictions remained.
Bernard starts in fine art because provenance, ownership, condition, sanctions, title, and counterparty questions routinely compress into short decision windows. The same failure appears across private assets, lending, insurance, compliance, and estate files.
Built from transaction infrastructure and trust-sensitive client work.
Timothy Kompanchenko
Co-Founder & CEO
14 years building transaction infrastructure for the art market — Collectrium, acquired by Christie’s; Christie’s; and Artory, merged with Winston Art Group. Across two exits and three organizations, the same pattern repeated: important decisions depended on fragmented records, specialist judgment, and reasoning that disappeared the moment the work was done.
Bernard is the system built to keep that reasoning traceable and reusable: the structured layer between raw evidence and a record worth acting on.
Kiki Tovey
Co-Founder & COO
Kiki brings 24 years across luxury hospitality and high-stakes consultative sales: operations, complex client work, and the bridge between specialist judgment and product logic. She brings the operational reality of how complex deals actually close — title review, ownership verification, compliance-heavy workflows — into Bernard’s playbook architecture.
Her job is making sure Bernard reflects how specialists actually think and work: the cadence, pressure, tact, and judgment of high-trust practice.
Before Bernard was a product, it was a response.
In February 2022, Russian forces began looting museum collections across occupied Ukraine. More than 2,000 works were taken from Mariupol alone — original Kuindzhi and Aivazovsky paintings, ancient icons, a handwritten Torah scroll. A year later, a federal law incorporated the collections of 77 Ukrainian museums into Russia’s state catalogue.
Ukraine’s records were not destroyed. They were scattered — across government registers, NGO databases, filing cabinets, photocopied inventory books, and archival microfilms. At least six disconnected systems, none talking to the others. Without structured, verified records of what existed before the occupation, legal recovery is impossible.
Years earlier, after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Vasyl Rozhko — then head of the Ministry’s Museum Department — launched a campaign to photocopy inventory books from museums across the country. Unglamorous, methodical, bureaucratic work. Today, that archive covers 647 museums. It is the broadest existing reference dataset for Ukrainian museum collections.
On February 20, 2026, the people who hold the scattered pieces sat in the same room for the first time. The archive. The 200,000 high-resolution images. The processing technology. The museum professionals who can verify every record. The government relationships. The legal connections. What had been separate efforts became a shared architecture: one processing layer connecting existing systems so that records become usable for restitution, sanctions enforcement, and Interpol submissions.
This work is separate from Bernard’s commercial product and operates under a dedicated structure with its own funding and resources. It stands on its own terms: humanitarian value, institutional usefulness, and the conviction that cultural memory, once lost, does not come back.