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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.