This Philadelphia Startup Tells You What Your Old Baseball Cards are Worth — With Just a Photo

Break out those old binders and bins from your mom’s attic — a Philadelphia startup built a new app for collectors to find out what their trading cards are worth.

CollX, pronounced “collects,” uses image-based technology to identify trading cards and determine how much they’re worth in real time, while also letting users digitize their card collections. The startup plans to introduce an in-app marketplace for users to buy and sell their cards later this year. The app launched on the App Store and Google Play Store on Monday.

CollX is starting with baseball, basketball and football trading cards, Co-founder and CEO Ted Mann said. The startup has already cataloged 10 million unique cards across those three sports, he said.

Trading cards and collectibles have been hot commodities since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as longtime collectors sifted through their old cards and younger generations began their collecting journeys. The U.S. sports trading card market was valued at $4.7 billion in 2019, and Research and Markets projects it to grow to upwards of $62 billion by 2027.

Newer sports companies are even getting in on trading cards and battling it out with legacy firms. Michael Rubin’s Fanatics recently bought Topps’ trading card division for $500 million, just months after Fanatics snatched away a trading card deal with Major League Baseball from Topps.

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