Ted Mann

There is a moment at any card show now where a kid hands a stranger a beat-up rookie card and the stranger lifts a phone instead of a loupe. One second later there is a number. That second belongs to Ted Mann.

Mann is the co-founder and CEO of CollX, the Haddonfield, New Jersey app that does one deceptively simple thing: photograph a trading card and it tells you what the card is and what it is worth. Under the hood sits a database of more than ten million distinct cards and a computer-vision engine that has gotten very good at reading a sliver of foil in bad gymnasium lighting. On the surface sits something a nine-year-old can use.

The app launched in 2021. By early 2025 it had crossed three million users, turned profitable, and closed a $10 million Series A. Its in-app marketplace, the part Mann cares about most these days, has grown into a place collectors reach for instead of eBay. "The marketplace is booming," he told interviewer Rich DeMuro. "I think it's become a place people look to buy cards as much, if not more, than eBay." That is a large sentence to say out loud about a company that did not exist five years ago.

What makes the claim land is that Mann has done a version of this before. Twice. CollX is the third company he has built around the same magic trick - point a phone at a thing in the real world, let software recognize it, and hand the user a decision. He keeps finding new things to point the phone at.

Mann did not arrive from the obvious place. He studied English at the University of Pennsylvania, with a political science minor, and graduated in 1999. The founder who keeps building image-recognition companies came up reading books, not training models.

His first company started with a personal annoyance. He was, by his own description, a terrible couponer. So in 2012, through the Philadelphia accelerator DreamIt, he launched SnipSnap - an app that let you photograph a paper coupon and carry it on your phone, searchable and shareable. It solved his problem and, it turned out, a few million other people's. SnipSnap grew past four million users and signed more than fifty retail partners, names like Toys "R" Us, Lord & Taylor and Bed Bath & Beyond.

In 2015 the Toronto image-recognition company Slyce bought SnipSnap for $6.5 million - $1 million in cash and up to $5.5 million in stock. Mann kept running SnipSnap from Philadelphia. A year later, in April 2016, Slyce handed him the whole company; he became president of the public company that had acquired his startup. Slyce later merged with an Austrian firm and became Partium, where Mann served as co-founder and president. The throughline was never coupons or cards. It was the camera.

The idea for CollX did not come from a deck. It came from watching his own kids fall hard for sports cards - the sorting, the trading, the endless arguing over what a card was actually worth. The valuation question was the bottleneck. Pricing a card meant tabs full of completed eBay listings and a lot of guessing. Mann had spent a decade teaching phones to recognize things. Cards were just the next thing.

He called Kostas Nasis, the technologist who had been CTO of SnipSnap, and the two reunited as co-founders - Mann as CEO, Nasis as CTO. They started in 2021 with a scanner. It grew into an ecosystem: instant identification, value tracking, portfolio management, and a marketplace where collectors buy and sell directly. What began as a tool for new and returning collectors became, in Mann's framing, the front door to the whole hobby.

He also reads the room better than most. CollX rode a card market that was changing underneath it - live selling, breakers, streamers moving inventory in real time. "A fifth of the show floor is dedicated to Whatnot streamers and breakers," Mann observed of a modern convention. "These streamers are running hundred-million-dollar businesses." A founder who notices where the floor space is going tends to know where the money follows.

CollX raised a $5.5 million seed in 2023, led by Austin's Brand Foundry Ventures, with Next Coast Ventures, FJ Labs, 114 Ventures, Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Morrison Seger all in. The February 2025 Series A brought $10 million more, with Brand Foundry and 114 Ventures returning to lead.

The tell is who else showed up. Howie Roseman, general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles. David Adelman, owner of the 76ers. And MLB All-Star Bobby Witt Jr., who joined the round as an investor. When the people who run the actual sports start backing the app that prices the cards, the hobby and the business have quietly merged.

Mann has now raised across three companies, and he has opinions about how to do it. His favored move, by his own telling: raise when you do not need the money. It is the kind of advice that only sounds easy until you try to follow it.

The English major is a better detail than it looks. Three companies in, every one of them is a computer-vision business, and the founder behind them came up parsing sentences, not pixels. It is a reminder that the hard part of these products was never only the model - it was knowing which everyday frustration was worth pointing a camera at.

He is also a builder who reuses his people. Nasis was his CTO at SnipSnap before he was his co-founder at CollX. There is a loyalty to the pattern - same trick, same collaborators, new problem - that reads less like a pivot artist and more like a craftsman who found his medium and keeps working it.

And he is genuinely in the hobby, not above it. Mann talks about CollX the way a collector talks about a card show, because he is the parent who got pulled in by his kids and never left. The company he is building is the one he wishes he had had when he was squinting at completed eBay listings, trying to tell a ten-year-old whether the trade was fair.