trading-cards
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Every Pokemon Card Runs Through a Belgian Town You've Never Heard Of
The name on the box is Pokemon, Hasbro or Disney. The company that actually prints, cuts and packs the cards is a 250-year-old Belgian manufacturer most players have never heard of.
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.
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.