A Pokémon card can have a remarkably busy life without going anywhere. It can be bought, offered back, bought again, and claimed by somebody on another continent while sitting quietly in a vault. Nicolas le Jeune built a company around that peculiar arrangement. For all the talk of digital ownership, the thing at the centre of his business remains stubbornly physical: printed cardboard, protected, catalogued, and waiting.
There is something pleasantly impertinent about putting childhood collectibles under the care of a company associated with armoured trucks. Yet the pairing explains Courtyard better than a speech about the future of finance. The card supplies the affection. The vault supplies the assurance. The website supplies the speed. Le Jeune's job has been to persuade people that those three can belong together.
A perfectly respectable job to leave
Before Courtyard, his working life involved selling and managing relationships inside Google and YouTube. His public career record includes Google Cloud roles in Dublin, then a move to the San Francisco Bay Area. At YouTube, he worked with music labels and later television and film partners. These were jobs in which a product's usefulness depended partly on the people persuaded to work with it.
He was good at that work. His LinkedIn record lists Google sales awards in 2016 and a President Club award in February 2018, described as recognition for the top one percent of the Google Cloud sales organisation. An earlier award recognised building an account management practice across several regions. Leaving such a career meant walking away from something already working.
Le Jeune has described growing up in Belgium, taking a Google job in Ireland, and eventually finding a role around music that he had wanted. After several years, the career ahead looked too predictable for his liking. He wanted to build something himself. The appeal is understandable: a good job gives you a path; a company of your own gives you responsibility for choosing the destination.
The watch collector in the home studio
His early Courtyard introduction contains a useful detail for anyone tempted to file him under Pokémon obsessive. His stated collecting interest was watches. Away from work, he produced songs in a home studio as a DJ and producer. The same introduction described an interest in design and 3D tools alongside his experience negotiating partnerships and organising operations.
These interests make the business feel less like a sudden detour. Music, watches, and trading cards each invite people to care intensely about distinctions that outsiders may overlook. A particular recording, a particular reference, a particular edition: much of the pleasure lives in knowing why one object matters. Building a marketplace for that pleasure requires some respect for the apparently unreasonable attachment.
His co-founder, Paulin Andurand, brought years of software engineering at Apple and an interest in smart contracts. In their 2021 team introduction, Andurand's collecting preference was French Pokémon cards. Their backgrounds divided the work naturally between relationships and engineering. Courtyard needed both. Someone had to make the ownership record work; someone also had to convince a keeper of valuables to take the underlying object seriously.
Why the cardboard stays put
The original Courtyard proposal, published in October 2021, began with a mundane complaint: trading physical objects involves delays, shipping costs, and opportunities for things to go wrong. An object stored safely can be sent elsewhere for a sale, only to end up stored safely again. The journey adds work even when neither owner particularly wants to hold it.
Courtyard proposed a one-to-one digital representation of a secured physical item. Ownership could move online. The item would remain accounted for in storage. If its owner wanted delivery, the digital token would be retired as the physical object was redeemed. Graded cards made a practical starting point because their protective cases have a small, standardised format.
That choice matters. It is easier to imagine a general theory of ownership than to organise a room full of objects. Starting with cards gave the theory edges and dimensions. A painting introduces awkward shapes and storage questions. A graded card arrives in a format that can be catalogued and handled repeatedly. The first category was also a way of keeping the physical problem manageable.
In February 2022, Courtyard announced its partnership with Brink's. The arrangement covered storage and the ability to transport redeemed collectibles. Here was a startup built around a new form of ownership, borrowing credibility from a familiar institution. The combination had a certain comic symmetry: a technology associated with weightless assets depended on somebody knowing precisely where the box was.
The first pack needed a fair shuffle
Courtyard joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Its early demonstration took the shape of a mystery drop of Pokémon cards. Le Jeune later recalled borrowing $500,000 from a friend to acquire the inventory and selling out the drop in two hours. That is an unusually tangible way to test a software idea. Before anybody could click, somebody had to pay for the cards.
In March 2022, he published an explanation of the drop's mechanics. The team wanted to recover the feeling of opening a pack and discovering its contents. It also wanted buyers to be able to check that the contents had not changed between purchase and reveal. The design included a cryptographic commitment to the hidden card and random assignment through Chainlink.
People with access to the complete card list, including Courtyard employees, were excluded from participating. The announced mint price was approximately the average market value of the included cards. These details show how much work can sit behind an apparently simple reveal. Surprise is enjoyable only when the organiser earns enough trust to be allowed to surprise you.
For le Jeune, a launch had to do two jobs at once. It had to attract buyers, and it had to demonstrate that a new ownership system could handle a familiar ritual. The packaging supplied the excitement. The rules supplied a reason to believe the excitement was honestly arranged. A fair shuffle is an old requirement, however modern the table.
A business with an exit button
NEA led Courtyard's $7 million seed funding. Its investment account described secured physical collectibles represented by redeemable digital twins, with Brink's looking after the objects. The appeal lay in trading across borders while the underlying asset stayed in a known location. For a founder whose earlier work involved partnerships, the business itself was becoming a set of partnerships made operational.
The later product added an especially consequential choice: an immediate buyback offer. By July 2025, Courtyard offered to repurchase a revealed card at 90 percent of its fair market value. Buyers could instead retain it, request delivery, or list it on a marketplace with no seller fee. Each route answered a different question a collector might have after opening a pack.
The distinction between the pack price and the card's market value deserves attention. An offer tied to market value does not promise to return 90 percent of whatever the customer spent. The card revealed may be worth less than the pack. The practical attraction is an available buyer, rather than certainty about the outcome. Le Jeune's company made the next decision easier to carry out.
This example uses the July 2025 reported policy. Pack price and card market value are separate amounts.
When growth sent the founders to the warehouse
In a 2026 interview, le Jeune described a less glamorous episode: he and his co-founder rented an Airbnb for three months while working through logistics problems at Brink's. Growth had outrun the processes. The response involved going to the operation and rebuilding how it worked. The physical half of the business had made itself impossible to ignore.
It is the sort of anecdote that gives an entrepreneurial story its proper scale. A sales graph can rise in a presentation without showing what must happen underneath it. Inventory still needs a reliable place in the system. The founders' extended stay puts ordinary work back into the picture: the distance between a successful transaction and a correctly managed object has to be closed by somebody.
The story also offers a useful reading of le Jeune's role. Negotiating a storage partnership gets a business started. Taking responsibility when the machinery strains helps it continue. His route from Google sales to collectibles operations looks less abrupt when seen through that obligation. A relationship has practical consequences, and the consequences eventually require attention beyond the meeting room.
The numbers grew; the obligation stayed
In July 2025, le Jeune announced a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures. He also reported monthly gross merchandise value rising from $50,000 in January 2024 to $50 million at the time of the announcement. Those are transaction values. They describe activity through the marketplace rather than the money Courtyard keeps.
The difference is especially relevant when an item can circulate repeatedly. Forerunner described cards trading multiple times before redemption and a business expanding from Pokémon and sports cards into comics. The same object could serve several customers over time. More activity need not mean an equivalent number of separate objects leaving storage, or an equivalent amount of company revenue.
By February 2026, Courtyard reported more than one million users and $750 million in annual gross merchandise value over the preceding year. A Lunar New Year Zodiac Pack gathered Pokémon associated with the twelve zodiac animals. Le Jeune described the ability to curate themed packs digitally. His ambitions had acquired another dimension: deciding how a large physical inventory could become a particular experience.
“Because it's all digital, we can create these experiences that would not be possible before.”Nicolas le Jeune, February 2026
Watches and other collectibles remain part of his broader stated vision. Expansion will bring its own questions about storage, pricing, and what buyers want to keep. His beginning suggests why those questions suit him. He has worked with partners, made music, collected watches, and helped build a business in which affection for an object meets the machinery required to sell it.
In the end, the most revealing image is still the stationary card. Around it, ownership, money, expectations, and decisions move. Le Jeune has spent the years since leaving Google trying to make that movement work. The vault has a quiet part in the story. The founder has the noisier assignment: making sure everyone outside it can agree on what happens next.