collectibles
(21)
Otis made a stock market out of things you love
A Banksy, a pair of Jordans, a comic book: Otis turned objects of desire into investments sold by the share. Public bought the company in 2022, taking its experiment in cultural ownership to a larger audience.
Collectors Put a Price on Trust. Now Comes the Waiting List.
The company behind PSA and PCGS turned expert judgment into a business spanning grading, storage and sales. A 9.9-million-item PSA backlog shows why scaling trust takes more than software.
Shortboxed Launched Into a Lockdown - Then Turned Comic-Book Friction Into Its Product
Two lifelong collectors built the comic marketplace they wanted to use, launched it as conventions vanished, and learned that trust is not a slogan - it is a stack of small operational choices.
The Keyboard Company That Sells Out in Ten Minutes
Gamers were covered in dripping fashion and typing on basic black plastic. Two collectors decided that gap was worth a brand - and turned mechanical keyboards into a drop culture.
tonies Built a $130 Cube - Then Turned Screen Guilt Into a 173 Million-Figurine Habit
Parents bought the padded speaker to escape the screen. tonies turned that relief into a collectible media ecosystem where every new character makes the box - and the business - more useful.
GameStop Refuses to Hit Continue on Its Own Game Over
A mall-era game store that became a stock-market legend is spending its second life buying trading cards, hoarding cash, and daring the market to count it out again.
StockX Put a Price Chart on Hype. Now It Wants the Whole Resale Floor
The Detroit marketplace made sneakers trade like stocks, then built a verification network around the deal. A decade later, used goods, live auctions and possessionless trading are testing how far that machinery can stretch.
Fanatics Wants Every Fan Moment - and Every Transaction Around It
The jersey seller has become a sports operating system, linking 100 million-plus fans to merchandise, cards, wagers, events and media. Its next contest is proving that one account can hold all of fandom without flattening what makes fans care.
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.
MGA Entertainment
The largest privately held toy company in the world was built on brass giftware, a $750 immigrant bet, and the radical idea that the fun is in not knowing what is in the box.
Hasbro
How a Rhode Island textile-scraps business became the house that Monopoly, Nerf and Magic: The Gathering built - and why its future increasingly runs on dice, decks and download codes.
Mighty Jaxx
Mighty Jaxx is a Singapore-based, technology-driven brand platform that designs, manufactures and distributes limited-edition art toys and 'phygital' collectibles. Founded by Jackson Aw in 2012, it pairs licensed pop-culture partnerships (Netflix, Disney, Hasbro, DC Comics, Formula 1, Toei Animation) with more than 120 artists, and embeds NFC chips into products to enable blockchain-based authentication and a digital fan journey. The company ships to collectors in 90+ countries and operates a family of brands spanning collectibles, retail (PLAYe), experiences and Web3.
FUN.com
FUN.com is a North Mankato, Minnesota-based online retailer of costumes, pop-culture merchandise, collectibles, toys, party supplies and seasonal decor. It is the parent brand of HalloweenCostumes.com, the largest online-only costume retailer in the world. Grown from a family costume-rental shop that opened in a Minnesota garage in 1992, the company now designs and manufactures thousands of its own exclusive, officially licensed costumes and animatronics in-house and ships them to customers across North America, Europe and Australia.
Novelship
Novelship is a Singapore-based online marketplace for buying and selling authentic sneakers, streetwear, apparel and collectibles across Asia-Pacific. Founded in 2018, it connects buyers and sellers through a bid-and-ask model, verifies every item in-house before it ships, and has grown into one of the region's largest platforms for limited-edition drops from brands like Nike, Jordan, Adidas, New Balance and ASICS.
Arta
Arta is a New York-based commerce technology company that helps the art, luxury, and collectibles market ship, insure, and track high-value and oversized items. Through an API, hosted checkout tools, and a Shopify app, Arta turns a traditionally manual, quote-by-quote logistics process into instant, automated fulfillment - covering everything from parcel to white-glove service across 65+ countries. Its customers include Sotheby's, Bonhams, Phillips, David Zwirner, Artsy, and 1stDibs.
Masterworks
Masterworks is a New York fintech that lets everyday investors buy fractional shares in multimillion-dollar blue-chip paintings by artists such as Basquiat, Picasso, Warhol and Banksy. Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Scott Lynn, the company buys individual artworks, registers each as a public offering with the SEC, and sells shares for as little as $20, then holds the work for several years before selling it and distributing proceeds. It reached unicorn status in 2021 after a $110M Series A and has grown to more than one million members.
BAXUS
BAXUS is a New York-based peer-to-peer marketplace for fine and rare wines and spirits, built on the Solana blockchain. It authenticates physical bottles, stores them in climate-controlled vaults, and issues digital tokens representing direct ownership - giving collectors and institutions real-time pricing, instant trade settlement, and the ability to use bottles as loan collateral. The platform has facilitated over $20 million in whiskey trades and raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital in 2024.
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.
TRLab
TRLab is an art-and-technology company that fuses Web3 tools with fine-art expertise to reinvent how people learn about, experience, and collect art. Co-founded in 2021 by Christie's non-executive Deputy Chairman Xin Li-Cohen and CEO Audrey Ou, the platform builds education-driven, interactive collecting journeys with major artists, estates and institutions - including the Calder Foundation, the Chris Burden Estate, Cai Guo-Qiang, Vogue and digital-art organization Rhizome. It has raised roughly $9.2M total, and more recently has begun extending its creative IP into lifestyle goods and immersive experiences.
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.
eBay
eBay is one of the original internet marketplaces, a global platform where roughly 136 million buyers shop across hundreds of millions of listings in about 190 markets. Born in 1995 as a hobby site called AuctionWeb, it pioneered the idea that strangers could trust strangers enough to trade online. Three decades later it has reinvented itself around enthusiast categories, certified collectibles, and recommerce - selling the new, the rare, and the gloriously second-hand.