card-grading
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Derek Jeter Wants to Keep Your Cards Out of the Shoebox
The Hall of Fame shortstop and the founder of LegalZoom built a company around a simple frustration: card collecting is a great hobby wrapped in a bad logistics problem. Arena Club grades, vaults, and trades the cards so collectors do not have to.
Rare Candy
Rare Candy is a New York- and Dallas-based online marketplace built for trading card game collectors. It brings the social energy of the neighborhood hobby shop online, letting people buy, sell, auction, and track sealed booster boxes, vintage packs, and graded cards across Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Gundam, and Lorcana. Co-founded by product veteran Chris Knape and YouTuber Lee Steinfeld (Leonhart), the platform pairs verified inventory and Thursday live auctions with an AI-powered card scanner that identifies cards in English and Japanese and surfaces real-time pricing.
Chris Knape
Chris Knape is the CEO and co-founder of Rare Candy, a marketplace and toolkit for trading card collectors that has scanned more than five million cards. He spent a decade inside marketplaces and platforms - YouTube, Google Play, Thumbtack, Tempo - before turning a pandemic-era return to childhood card collecting into a venture-backed company built alongside Pokemon YouTuber Leonhart. Raised on a sailboat in the US Virgin Islands and trained at Dartmouth, BCG, and the youngest-manager ranks of early YouTube, he now spends his days authenticating, auctioning, and tracking the cards that nerds love.
CollX
CollX is a Philadelphia-area startup whose mobile app lets collectors snap a photo of a sports or trading card and instantly identify it and see its current market value. Built around AI visual search trained on a database of more than 17 million cards, CollX has grown from a quick valuation tool into a full collection-management platform and peer-to-peer marketplace where over 3 million users scan, organize, price, buy, sell, and trade cards. The company monetizes through Pro and Gold subscriptions, marketplace commissions, and referral revenue from hobby partners like PSA, Whatnot, and Fanatics.