Break out those old binders and bins from your mom's attic — a Philadelphia startup built a new app for collectors to find out what their trading cards are worth.
CollX, pronounced "collects," uses image-based technology to identify trading cards and determine how much they’re worth in real time, while also letting users digitize their card collections. The startup plans to introduce an in-app marketplace for users to buy and sell their cards later this year. The app launched on the App Store and Google Play Store on Monday.
CollX is starting with baseball, basketball and football trading cards, Co-founder and CEO Ted Mann said. The startup has already cataloged 10 million unique cards across those three sports, he said.
Trading cards and collectibles have been hot commodities since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as longtime collectors sifted through their old cards and younger generations began their collecting journeys. The U.S. sports trading card market was valued at $4.7 billion in 2019, and Research and Markets projects it to grow to upwards of $62 billion by 2027.
Newer sports companies are even getting in on trading cards and battling it out with legacy firms. Michael Rubin’s Fanatics recently bought Topps’ trading card division for $500 million, just months after Fanatics snatched away a trading card deal with Major League Baseball from Topps.
Mann started CollX in September after trying to help his young sons buy and sell trading cards at market-value prices.
“They kept running into the same brick wall that I had when I was a kid, which is they couldn't figure out what the cards were worth,” Mann said.
Taking the same technology he used to build and run multiple startups, Mann applied image-based search tools to collectibles available through online marketplaces in order to determine what trading cards are worth and how their value has changed through the years. CollX aggregates public price data from marketplaces like eBay to help collectors value their cards.
Mann has had his hands in a number of image recognition-centric software startups, including coupon digitizing company SnipSnap, which was acquired by visual product search tech startup Slyce in 2015 for $6.5 million. He stayed on with Slyce as CEO and integrated its technology into websites from retailers including Abercrombie & Fitch. From Slyce he spun out Partium, a startup that uses image search technology to identify spare parts for industrial and automotive companies.
Mann stepped back as CEO of Partium in September and now serves as president, and he left Slyce in September after the company was acquired by Syte, an Israeli product discovery platform, for an undisclosed amount.
“I was kind of ready to do something new,” Mann said. “And then this idea came along.”
Mann is joined in starting CollX by Co-founder Kostas Nasis, former chief technology officer at SnipSnap. The company has raised about $500,000 from angel investors, self-funding and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Mann said.
CollX stands in direct competition with mega resellers like eBay and Beckett, which have dominated the collectibles market for decades. eBay recently launched its own price checker called Price Guide, which tracks prices over time for trading cards in sports and games.
EBay is the “800-pound gorilla,” Mann said, but startups have been able to come along and build new marketplaces and “eat eBay’s lunch, just by providing a better experience for collectors.” He referenced another Philadelphia startup, WatchBox, which has taken tremendous market share of the watch reselling industry in recent years.
Mann believes CollX has an advantage over legacy sites because the startup can appeal to sellers and buyers who may not make a living off of trading cards, but who may be looking to see how much their cards are worth.
“Even if we're just taking a bite out of eBay, it's going to be a huge business, but we think we can potentially grow beyond that by activating all those dormant collectors,” Mann said.
CollX plans to expand into hockey and soccer next, and it will also grow into other popular trading card categories like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, Mann said. CollX’s future ambitions include adding other collectibles such as comics, vinyl, Pez dispensers and more.
“Once we expand out of these collectibles that are printed images, we know we will be able to go into those other categories. The challenge is just gathering the data and building the image database to be able to make that really sing,” Mann said. “But we have some ideas about how to get that going.”
