There is a shoebox in a closet somewhere with a thousand cards in it, and nobody knows what any of them are worth. CollX exists to open that box, point a phone at it, and answer the question in seconds.
01 / WHO THEY ARE NOWThe pile, priced
Open the CollX app, hold your camera over a card, and a number appears. Not a guess. The card gets matched against a database of more than 17 million sports and trading cards, identified, and tagged with its current average market price. The whole transaction takes about as long as it takes to flip the card over.
What started as a way to settle one family's "how much is this worth?" argument is now a platform with over 3 million users, roughly 400,000 of them active every month, and a marketplace where collectors actually buy, sell, and trade. CollX is no longer just a scanner. It is becoming the place the hobby keeps its receipts.
02 / THE PROBLEM THEY SAWValue was a guessing game
Trading cards are a multi-billion-dollar hobby built on a shaky foundation: nobody really knew what anything was worth. Prices lived in thick annual guides that went stale the day they printed, in eBay sold listings you had to dig for, and in the heads of the guy at the card shop. A collector with a box of cards had a box of question marks.
That uncertainty had a cost. People undersold gems and overpaid for commons. Kids couldn't tell their parents what their collection was worth. And the market moved every day - a player has a good week, the card jumps - while the tools to track it moved once a year, if that. The information was out there. It was just slow, scattered, and impossible to point a camera at.
03 / THE FOUNDERS' BETPoint the camera, get the answer
CEO Ted Mann has spent a career on one idea: that you should be able to point a phone at a thing and have software tell you what it is. He ran the visual-search company Slyce and co-founded SnipSnap before that. So when his two youngest sons asked him how much their cards were worth, the answer wasn't a shrug - it was a prototype.
Mann and co-founder and CTO Kostas Nasis, with President Fred Barnes, bet that visual recognition was finally good enough to identify a card from a snapshot, and that if you nailed that one moment - the instant of "oh, that's what it's worth" - everything else collectors needed could grow around it. Scanning would bring people in. Collection management would keep them. A marketplace would pay the bills.
How a scanner became a marketplace
Ted Mann builds an app to help his sons value their card collection. CollX is born.
Brand Foundry leads the round. Plans: hire, and add an in-app marketplace. ~600K users.
Buy/sell/trade goes live; CollX AI launches as the first AI tool built for the card hobby.
Co-led by Brand Foundry and 114 Ventures. MLB star Bobby Witt Jr. joins as investor and ambassador.
Innovation of the Year at the Mantel Hobby Awards. ~20% month-over-month growth.
04 / THE PRODUCTOne scan, a whole stack of tools
The free app does the headline trick: scan a card - baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, or Pokemon, Magic, and Yu-Gi-Oh - and get an instant ID and market value. The Scan+ mode reads all the text on a card (player, set, number, serial) to nail rare, autographed, and numbered cards at roughly a 95% detection rate. From there it fans out into the rest of the hobby.
CollX AI
The first AI built for the card hobby - insights, plus coaching on negotiation, shipping, and selling faster.
Marketplace
Buy and sell with a credit card, shipping and tracking included. CollX takes ~10% commission.
CollX Pro / Gold
Subscriptions (~$10/mo) unlocking deeper collection analytics and selling tools.
Card Dealer Pro
For shops: bulk-scan inventory and sell across multiple channels at once.
05 / THE PROOFThe numbers cooperate
The growth is the argument. CollX went from about 600,000 users in 2023 to more than 3 million by 2025, climbing roughly 20% month over month. The marketplace - the part that's supposed to make the money - now has around 30,000 buyers and 20,000 sellers, and CEO Ted Mann has said marketplace revenue is growing and will eventually overtake subscriptions.
From 600K to 3M+ users
The credibility is the other argument. PSA handles grading referrals. Whatnot and Fanatics plug in for live shopping. Topps moves boxes. And the cap table reads like a hobby all-star team: Bobby Witt Jr. as investor and ambassador, Collectors CEO Nat Turner, the GM of the Philadelphia Eagles, and an owner of the 76ers.
- 3M+ total users, ~400K monthly active, ~20% month-over-month growth
- ~30,000 buyers and ~20,000 sellers in the marketplace
- $5.5M seed (2023) + $10M Series A (2025), ~$26M raised in total
- 2025 Innovation of the Year, Mantel Hobby Awards
06 / THE MISSIONThe operating system for the hobby
CollX's stated goal is simple to say and hard to do: make it effortless for anyone to know what their cards are worth, and to buy, sell, and trade them with confidence. The Series A pitch wasn't "scale the scanner." It was grow the community. The bet is that if CollX owns the moment of valuation, it can own the trust that comes after it - and trust is the thing a fragmented, hunch-driven hobby never had.
07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWThe shoebox, reopened
The collectibles market keeps swelling, and more of it runs through phones every year. The companies that win won't be the ones with the prettiest checklists - they'll be the ones that own the data and the moment of decision. CollX is wiring grading, valuation, live shopping, and a marketplace into a single tap, which makes it less a card app than infrastructure the rest of the hobby has to plug into.
So go back to that shoebox in the closet. The thousand cards nobody could value. Today you hold a phone over them, one by one, and they turn into numbers - a portfolio you can track, trade, and sell without ever finding out where the card shop went. CollX didn't just answer the question. It made the box worth opening.