A South Jersey company that has developed an app that lets collectors scan and determine the value of their sports trading cards has acquired a Denver company to expand its offerings to dealers and retail outlets.
CollX, whose app has grown to about 150,000 users, bought Card Dealer Pro, which has developed software for stores and dealers to rapidly inventory, annotate and price trading cards — and list them for sale online through multiple channels including eBay and Shopify.
Financial terms of the deal are being kept confidential.
Ted Mann, co-founder and CEO of CollX, said the deal was put into play when he was contacted by one of his app's users, Fred Barnes.
Mann knew Barnes, a Denver-based card dealer and software entrepreneur, had developed a competing card scanning technology, so he was a little guarded when they first began chatting.
"He was very effusive in his praise of CollX," Mann said. "We were talking about how dealers could use a similar technology."
It was then that Mann learned Barnes had developed that technology, called Card Dealer Pro.
Card Dealer Pro is a subscription software that enables professional sellers, such as dealers and stores, to scan large volumes of trading cards, create beautiful imagery for selling, automatically tag and annotate all card details, track inventory and cross-sell through multiple marketplaces.
"I was intrigued," Mann said.
The discussions evolved into an exploration of joining forces, which led to CollX acquiring Card Dealer Pro and Barnes joining the combined company as a co-founder with a "significant" equity stake. The combined company will have 15 employees, a combination of staff and contract workers, with CollX having 10 and Card Dealer Pro having five.
"What really made this deal super-exciting is we can enable the stores and the dealers to sell their cards directly through our marketplace at discounted fees and better consumer experience," Mann said. "We think it will be a game changer."
Card Dealer Pro's software is currently being used by more than 100 card dealers to manage their online sales.
Both CollX and Card Dealer Pro use visual-search imaging technology to instantly identify sports cards from a photo. The combined database built by the companies includes more than 17 million unique cards across baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, and wrestling card collectors and sellers.
“The sports card hobby is booming, but many card stores aren’t able to realize their full potential because they simply don’t have technology to help them,” Barnes said. “At best, a store may track their cards with a spreadsheet or ledger, but you’re so limited in how many cards you can manage and sell that way. With our software, dealers are scanning tens of thousands at a time, and listing over 100,000 cards on average.”
According to Barnes, the company's clients are seeing online sales of $3,000 or more per day.
The trading cards and collectibles industry has experienced a surge during the Covid-19 pandemic as longtime collectors sifted through their old cards, and younger generations took up the hobby. The U.S. sports trading card market was valued at $4.7 billion in 2019; Research and Markets projects it to grow to upwards of $62 billion by 2027.
Barnes said his company launched its own mobile app called Sports Card Scanner, then he saw the CollX app. "I realized how much better an experience it was for collectors,” he said. “I could also immediately see how a marketplace tied to user-collections makes the experience of buying and selling cards so much better, since you know what the other person owns.”
Mann started CollX last year in Haddonfield with co-founder Kostas Nasis 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 in an interview earlier this year with the Business Journal.
CollX has now been used with 10 million sports cards, Mann said.
Mann was involved in several 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.
Pronounced "collects," CollX has raised more than $500,000 from angel investors, self-funding and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Mann said.
CollX and Card Dealer Pro will be displaying their products and services at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Atlantic City at the end of July.
