The neighborhood hobby shop didn't die. It moved online - and started running Thursday night auctions for the whole internet.
Where the pull, the crowd, and the gavel all live on one screen
It's Thursday night, and somewhere a countdown clock is ticking. A vintage Pokemon box - shrink-wrapped, untouched since a decade most bidders were too young to remember - sits under studio lights. In the chat, a few hundred people argue about condition, centering, and whether the seller is bluffing. Then a familiar voice, one that 1.8 million YouTube subscribers already know, says the number out loud. The gavel here is a livestream.
This is Rare Candy on an ordinary week. Not a warehouse, not an auction house with velvet ropes - a marketplace that behaves like the corner card shop it was built to replace. The kind of place where you didn't just buy a booster pack; you hung around, talked trades, and learned the difference between a good deal and a great one from whoever was behind the counter.
That shop is mostly gone. The strip-mall hobby store that once anchored a town's collectors closed quietly, one lease at a time, as buying moved to faceless listings and screenshotted DMs. What disappeared wasn't the cards. It was the room - the social hub where trading, competing, and showing off your best pull actually happened.
Rare Candy's founders noticed the absence. Chris Knape had spent a career building products and marketplaces. Lee Steinfeld - known to the internet as Leonhart - had spent his building an audience, one Pokemon video at a time. One knew how commerce works. The other knew what fans actually want. In 2021 they put the two halves together.
The result is a marketplace that treats collectors like fans rather than line items. You can buy sealed booster boxes and vintage packs, bid on high-end graded slabs, or simply track what your binder is worth without selling a thing. The inventory is verified before it ships. The drops land weekly. And the auctions - the part that makes the whole thing feel alive - run every Thursday, open to any graded or sealed item, hosted live with the audience talking back in real time.
Then there's the scanner. Point a phone at a card and Rare Candy names it - the exact variation, English or Japanese, raw or entombed in a PSA, CGC, or Beckett slab - and pulls real-time pricing from across the market. It's the closest thing collecting has to a universal remote. Add to binder, add to wishlist, watch the value move. The friction between wanting a card and knowing everything about it more or less vanishes.
It would be easy to file a Pokemon startup under "cute" and move on. The cap table argues otherwise. Rare Candy's $4M seed round, closed in late 2021, drew Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, Multicoin Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Seven Seven Six, and M13 - plus individual checks from Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. These are not people who invest in nostalgia for its own sake.
What they saw was a behavior, not a fad. Collecting is one of the oldest hobbies there is, and the money moving through trading cards is real and growing. The gap wasn't demand - it was infrastructure built by people who understood the culture from the inside. By mid-2025, monthly active users had grown roughly 30x in a year, and Konvoy Ventures - a fund that specializes in the business of play - came aboard as the company pushed beyond Pokemon into Magic: The Gathering and the rest of the fandom map.
Buy: sealed product, singles, graded cards, and pre-orders for new releases. Sell: list your own inventory for a flat 13% fee, or, if you're moving serious volume - at least 100 graded cards or 25 sealed SKUs - hand it to the White Glove service and let them do the work. Track: build a digital binder, follow whole sets, and watch live values across six different games. Bid: show up on Thursday and try your luck. Or just lurk in the Discord and learn, which is what the counter of a good hobby shop was always half for anyway.
A marketplace, an auction house, and a scanner walk into an app
Sealed booster boxes, packs, vintage product, and graded cards across six games - always-on listings from trusted sellers.
Weekly auctions open to any graded or sealed item, with featured lots hosted live on stream and audience chat.
Point, scan, own. Identifies any variation - English or Japanese, raw or slabbed - with real-time third-party pricing.
Upload your collection, build a wishlist, browse and track whole sets, and watch values move over time.
Weekly deal drops, member-only auctions, and pre-orders for new releases - first dibs on the grails.
For high-volume sellers moving 100+ graded cards or 25+ sealed SKUs, a concierge tier handles the heavy lifting.
Reimagining the experience of the neighborhood hobby shop in a digital setting.
The product-and-marketplace half. Knape brought the operator's understanding of how commerce, listings, and trust actually scale.
The audience half. One of the largest Pokemon creators on YouTube with 1.8M+ subscribers - and the voice hosting the Thursday auctions.
Rare Candy is founded, pairing marketplace-builder Chris Knape with Pokemon YouTuber Leonhart.
Closes a $4M seed round with a16z, Ribbit, Multicoin, Seven Seven Six, and angels including Tobias Lutke.
Ships the AI card scanner and mobile apps; builds out live auctions and the collector community on Discord.
Reports roughly 30x monthly active user growth over the prior year.
Konvoy Ventures joins as a strategic investor; expansion begins beyond Pokemon into Magic and other franchises.
Auctions, mystery boxes, and the creator behind the counter
The countdown clock is ticking again. Same sealed box under the same lights, same few hundred people in the chat doing the math. Except now the crowd isn't limited to whoever could drive to the strip mall before it closed - it's anyone with a phone and an opinion about centering. The voice calls the number, the gavel falls, and somewhere a collector who has never met another one in person feels, for a second, like part of a room.
That room was supposed to be gone. Rare Candy rebuilt it - with better lighting, a bigger crowd, and a scanner that knows every card by name. The hobby shop didn't need saving so much as it needed a new address. This one is open every night, and busiest on Thursdays.