Philly trading card startup CollX raises $10M Series A, will focus on growing community
CollX raised a $10 million Series A, with plans to use the funding for marketing and platform development efforts, cofounder and CEO Ted Mann told Technical.ly this week. Lead investors Brand Foundry Venture and 114 Ventures returned after contributing to the company's $5.5 million seed round in 2023. Local investor Ben Franklin Technology Partners, along with Next Coast Ventures and FJ labs also contributed to both rounds.
The startup touts its local investor support, despite a lack of specialized, consumer VCs in the region.
'It's largely pouring fuel on the fire,' he said. 'It gives us more ability to accelerate user growth with paid marketing, to accelerate our engineering work and ongoing development.'
CollX did not disclose its valuation.
It's been difficult as an early-stage consumer app to raise money from Philly-area investors because there aren't a lot of institutional investors in the region focused on consumer companies, Mann said.
Fortunately, Haddonfield-based CollX, a former RealLIST startup, built a relationship with Philadelphia-based 114 Ventures which specializes in early-stage companies. The company clicked with the follow-turned-lead investor because one of the firm's founders, Mike Petrakis, has experience building a marketplace platform, he said.
It helps that the consumer focus also gained interest from stakeholders in the sports world, like Howie Roseman, general manager of the Eagles and David Adelman, owner of the 76ers. Most recently, MLB player Bobby Witt Jr. contributed to the funding round.
'We're very fortunate that Witt happens to be already very well known and synonymous with collecting,' Mann said.
Tapping into the niche card-selling market
CollX's app uses AI to scan, identify and price trading cards. The platform also has a marketplace, where users can buy and sell cards.
The company is working on new features for its marketplace, Mann said, including plans to expand the marketplace to include other product types like boxes of cards and complete card sets.
CollX launched in 2021 as a tool to help trading card collectors understand the value of their cards. The platform has a visual search function that scrapes pricing data from other websites to estimate how much cards are worth.
It is also starting to see more high-value cards being sold on the marketplace, signaling that users trust the marketplace to complete those transactions, Mann said.
With the most recent raise, CollX plans to integrate its Card Dealer Pro software more into the app's marketplace, Mann said. CollX acquired Denver-based competitor Card Dealer Pro in 2022, which allows users to scan, inventory and sell cards in bulk on the platform.
'When they list on eBay or other sites, they can now control the listings from Card Dealer Pro. They can cross-list to their own website, on Shopify, or to the collective marketplace,' Mann said. 'We're gonna beef up what we're doing there.'
A community of traders, on app and IRL
Since launching the marketplace in 2023, the process of moving users over there has been slow, Mann said. But now, the momentum is picking up and they have 30,000 active buyers and 20,000 active sellers.
Mann is especially excited to see the platform's community continue to grow. They currently have about 3 million users total, he said.
Those users are taking the community they build into other aspects of card collecting, too. Over the last year, the platform has been used more and more as a tool to expose people to the different aspects of card collecting, like card shows or card opening livestreams, he said.
'We just want to embrace this role as the on-ramp, as the guys that help onboard collectors and show them the ropes,' Mann said. 'Teach them how to buy a … card, how to get it graded, how to build a community, how to meet other collectors and start to forge some relationships.'
Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
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