A trading card has a stubborn quality: it occupies space. It must be graded, photographed, insured, packed and trusted every time it changes hands. Courtyard's answer is to let the cardboard sit still. The San Francisco company stores the physical collectible in a vault and gives its owner a digital representation that can move in seconds. Then it wraps that useful bit of infrastructure in the oldest sales device in the hobby - the mystery pack.
On a phone, the experience is almost comically compressed. Pick a pack. Watch the reveal. A graded Pokémon or sports card, comic, watch or certified coin appears. The object is not a jpeg pretending to be scarce; it already exists in insured storage. Keep it there, ask for it to be shipped, list it in Courtyard's marketplace, swap it with another collector, or sell it back immediately. The company says that last offer is generally 90 percent of market value.
That exit door is the design trick. Mystery packs normally sell suspense and leave the customer alone with the result. Courtyard sells suspense, too, but it also makes disappointment liquid. You may not like your rookie card. You do not need to photograph it, find a buyer, print a label and hope the envelope arrives. One tap converts it back into spending power, minus a spread. The experience feels less like an auction house and more like a vending machine that accepts returns before the can hits the tray.
The card stays. The market moves.
Courtyard was founded in 2021 by Nicolas le Jeune, a former Google and YouTube manager, and Paulin Andurand, a former Apple software engineer. The pair entered Y Combinator's Winter 2022 class with a very 2022 description: physical collectibles, represented by NFTs and stored with a global security company. A $7 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates followed that November. Brink's, which handled the early vaulting operation, invested alongside Y Combinator, OpenSea Ventures, VaynerFund and Cherry Ventures.
The engineering remains onchain. Courtyard creates a one-to-one ownership record for each authenticated object on Polygon, along with detailed scans or a three-dimensional digital twin. But the sales language has changed. Its LinkedIn page now calls the category “entertainment shopping.” Y Combinator says the company “turns shopping into entertainment with instant liquidity.” The word NFT has moved from the shop window to the stockroom.
January 2024
July 2025
Forerunner Ventures
That translation seems to have mattered. In Fortune, le Jeune said Courtyard went from selling about $50,000 of merchandise a month in January 2024 to $50 million a month by July 2025. Those are company-reported gross merchandise figures, not revenue, but the thousandfold increase explains why Forerunner Ventures led a $30 million Series A. NEA, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, Prelude Ventures and ParaFi Capital also joined the round.
“Courtyard stands out as the first collectibles marketplace that's actually designed to be liquid.”Nicole Johnson, Forerunner Ventures
A five-button collection
The customer is a collector who wants discovery without the traditional chores. A newcomer can buy a lower-priced pack without knowing how to inspect a raw card. A practiced collector can hunt a specific grade, sell into the marketplace or store a large collection without filling a closet. Courtyard publishes the value bands and probabilities for its packs, and its apps offer pricing data and filters. It is not a guarantee that a pull will feel good. It is an attempt to make the rules and the next moves legible.
Direct trading, launched in May 2026, closes an especially awkward loop. Collectors can propose one-for-one or many-for-many swaps and add cash when values do not line up. Acceptance changes ownership instantly; the physical items remain on their shelves. Pure item swaps are free, while fees can apply to the cash portion. It takes a ritual usually conducted through forum messages, screenshots and mutual suspicion and turns it into a product flow.
The inventory loop
Free marketplace, paid flywheel
Courtyard's zero-seller-fee claim is easier to understand when the marketplace is viewed as one room in a larger house. The company sources inventory through dealers and partners, puts that inventory into packs, and stands ready to repurchase an unwanted reveal below its assessed market value. It can later place the same object into another pack. Courtyard told Fortune that a card sells an average of eight times a month on the platform. The repeated transaction is possible because fulfillment waits until somebody actually wants the object at home.
In that loop, free storage is not simply a perk. It lowers the collector's reason to remove inventory. Insurance reduces anxiety. A no-fee listing gives the owner another reason to keep the object inside the system. The buyback spread gives Courtyard a disclosed source of economics even when the seller-facing marketplace is free. Shipping and handling arrive only at redemption; cash used to balance a trade may also incur a fee.
There is a meaningful caution hidden inside the cleverness. A mystery pack is a variable outcome. Transparent odds and an expected-value framework do not ensure that a particular customer likes the pull or agrees with the market estimate. An immediate 90 percent offer limits friction, not loss. Courtyard's growth depends on making the loop enjoyable without making the mechanics feel evasive. In Fortune's own test, a $25 basketball pack produced a card valued around $10 and a $9 buyback offer. The reporter kept it in the vault and waited for better basketball.
Object movements per resale
Illustrative operational comparison: a conventional resale commonly sends the item to a buyer, while a vaulted resale changes title without moving the object.
A vault built for fidgety assets
The physical layer is where Courtyard stops looking like a conventional app. Brink's was a natural early partner, but a vault designed for gold assumes that the asset enjoys sitting quietly. Collectibles arrive, get imaged, change categories, join packs and leave for a collector's home. In early 2025, Courtyard announced its own dedicated Delaware facility with temperature-controlled storage and more fulfillment capacity. It said the move would speed redemptions, reopen collector submissions and allow purchases sent directly from other marketplaces to enter storage without sales tax.
The company has also widened its sourcing problem. Pokémon and sports cards led the way, followed by comics, watches and certified coins. Each category needs different expertise and credible third-party authentication. A comic's condition, a watch's provenance and a coin's grade cannot be reduced to one universal checklist. Courtyard has used established graders such as PSA, CGC, PCGS and NGC around relevant inventory, and brought in numismatic expertise when it launched coins.
That operational depth is a defensible difference, though not an empty field. eBay and Goldin bring enormous buyer networks. Fanatics Collect combines marketplace and vaulting. PSA has its own vault and dealer-offer network. Whatnot owns live-shopping energy; Arena Club and Alt serve card collectors with their own spins on grading, custody and liquidity. Courtyard's particular stack is the combination: randomized discovery, disclosed pack odds, insured custody, immediate buyback, no seller fee and direct swaps.
The format may be bigger than the card
Courtyard's ambition is visible in the categories it keeps testing. Coins introduce history. Watches introduce higher ticket prices. Comics introduce narrative fandom. Soccer memorabilia appeared as surprise bounties inside a Pokémon collection. One promotion scattered the chance of an estimated $87,000 meteorite-dial Rolex across many otherwise unrelated packs. The collectible changes; the loop remains recognizable.
This is where the company fits in the market: between a marketplace, a vault operator and a mobile game, but not fully any one of them. It competes for the collector's transaction, the shopper's attention and the dealer's inventory at once. Its app has crossed 100,000 Android downloads, and the Google Play listing claims a marketplace trusted by more than one million collectors. LinkedIn shows a remote-first staff in the high 80s; Y Combinator lists about 90 people.
The useful idea to steal is not “put it on a blockchain.” It is to identify which part of ownership actually needs to move. Courtyard separates possession from delivery, discovery from expertise and a purchase from the obligation to keep it. The token is the receipt. The vault is the warehouse. The reveal is the theater. The buyback button is what keeps the seats turning over.