Charlottesville tech startup CardBoard Live closed a seed round of funding last month to build a digital platform that allows viewers to buy products they see used in a live stream show, such as YouTube or Amazon’s Twitch.
The startup aims to provide an experience similar to watching a professional poker match but with a more customized card game, such as Magic: The Gathering.
Viewers watch players compete and interact with other viewers during the game, but this is where CardBoard Live adds another layer: the company is developing e-commerce software that identifies the cards in players’ hands and provides a shopping portal for viewers to buy that card without leaving the show.
“We’re creating a platform for live content creation with live purchasing,” said co-founder Wilson Hunter. “Right now on other platforms, viewers have to click a link out to a store or use a coupon code, whereas CardBoard Live will detect the card being played and viewers can see a price and add to a shopping cart right there.”
Hunter, CEO, and co-founder James Hsu, CTO, chose hobby card and tabletop games as their initial go-to-market vertical for both personal and market viability reasons.
There are over 200 million hobby game players worldwide, and over 30 million Magic: The Gathering players alone.
Personally, the co-founders themselves could be considered “subject matter experts” — Hunter was a top finisher in the national rankings as a professional Magic player and Hsu published a 196-page memoir on his 20 years of playing Magic.
Hunter, working out of Charlottesville early-stage tech incubator Machine, traveled across the country and competed in Magic tournaments while running his own full-time yearbook sales business with Herff Jones prior to launching CBL in 2017.
Based in Beijing, Hsu held senior product management roles at Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft. Hsu was leading the core user experience team for Microsoft’s digital voice assistant Cortana before he joined Hunter earlier this year to begin working on CardBoard Live.
Currently, the CardBoard Live app has a Twitch extension, but it soon plans be a platform of its own. The vast majority of the funding is going towards hiring a team of up to 30 software developers, Hunter said.
Twitch, acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million, primarily focuses on video game streaming, most notably e-sports broadcasting. The platform’s usage metrics have increased sharply in 2018. According to TwitchTracker.com statistics, over 46 billion minutes of content are watched per month on Twitch (55 percent more than 2017), and the content is created by over 3.3 million broadcasters (42 percent more than 2017).
This surge of video live stream growth is the wave Hunter and Hsu are hoping to catch and tailor to hobby games. Yet, Hunter says, card games and board games are just the beginning.
Eventually, the company hinted at plans to diversify into other video live-stream verticals such as sports, cosmetics and fashion. But for now, Hunter said, it's “focused primarily on hobby games and not actively positioning for other markets at this time, but we're also aware of the broad applications of our tech.”
Engin Son, lead investor from the Charlottesville Angel Network, said, “CardBoard Live fills a need that [Hunter] has a lot of experience with. People need more information when watching this game being played. Not only that, but [Hunter] also came up with a way to actually make the whole endeavor profitable.”
In the next two weeks, CardBoard Live plans to launch a campaign to raise up to $1 million on one of the leading crowdfunding platforms for tech startups, Republic.
In early 2019, Hunter and Hsu are gearing up for a Series A in the range of “several million dollars,” at which point they would begin looking to hire local developers in the spring, including an artificial intelligence and machine learning specialist and creative design team.
“I used to play pro Magic as a competitive and creative outlet just to survive the sales grind,” Hunter said. “But now I get to work on something I love every day and I’m fortunate to have investors and a team who also believe in the vision and share in the passion.”
