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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.
Brian Lee’s Real Product Is Trust
From legal forms to shoes, diapers and sports cards, the categories keep changing. Brian Lee’s durable obsession is making unfamiliar transactions feel safe enough to try.
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.
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.
Ted Mann
Ted Mann is the co-founder and CEO of CollX, a Haddonfield, New Jersey app that lets collectors photograph a trading card and get its market value in under a second. A serial founder who built the couponing app SnipSnap (sold to Slyce for $6.5M) and later ran Slyce/Partium, Mann turned his kids' love of card trading into a business with more than 3 million users, a booming in-app marketplace, and a $10M Series A backed by sports figures like Eagles GM Howie Roseman, 76ers owner David Adelman, and MLB star Bobby Witt Jr.