❓ Problem

Almost everyone has a shoebox of collectibles. Cards from a childhood obsession, a run of comics from a market stall, a binder that has not been opened since school. The global trading card market is worth $13 billion and heading for $21 billion by 2034, and the comic book market adds another $13.76 billion on top. Almost none of the people holding that stuff know what any of it is worth.

Identifying a card properly is genuinely hard, which is the bit non-collectors underestimate. A single Charizard exists across dozens of sets, languages, print runs, holo patterns, reverse variants, promo stamps and error runs, and the difference between two of them that look identical at arm's length can be three zeroes. Working it out by hand means squinting at set symbols, cross-referencing a database, then trawling completed eBay listings to find comps that actually match. Ten minutes a card, for a collection that runs to thousands.

But here is the real kicker, and it is not the identification. It is the decision that comes next. Collectors graded 26.6 million cards in 2025, a record, with PSA alone handling 19.26 million of them, up 26% year on year. Grading is not free. PSA paused all four of its Value tiers on 2 June 2026 while it digs out of a backlog, so the cheapest live rate went from $24.99 to $79.99 overnight. Every card you send in that comes back a 7 is roughly a hundred quid set on fire, all in. Millions of people are making a high-stakes financial call with a magnifying glass and a hunch, and there is no consumer product that tells them, in ten seconds, whether it is worth doing.

Here's the idea.

✅ Solution

A phone-first collectibles identifier that scans any card or comic, tells you exactly what it is, what it is worth, and whether it is worth grading.

• Point, scan, identified. Photograph the card and the app returns set, year, card number, language, variant and print run. Not "a Charizard". The specific Charizard.
• Live comps, not a vibe. It pulls recent sold prices from real marketplace data and returns a range with confidence, plus raw versus graded pricing side by side, so the number means something.
• An AI condition read across centring, corners, edges and surface. Labelled clearly as an estimate, never as a grade. It answers the only question that costs real money: submit this one, or leave it in the binder.
• The collection becomes a portfolio. Everything scanned is catalogued and valued daily. Total value, biggest movers, cost basis, gains and losses. Collecting turned into something you check like a stock app.
• Then it takes the next action for you. Grading-ready submissions routed to a partner with the scans attached, and one-tap listing to a marketplace when you want to sell.

The wedge is narrow and deliberate: be the thing people open before they spend money on grading. The catalogue, the portfolio and the marketplace all fall out of owning that one moment.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• Trading cards are a $13 billion market growing at 8.5% a year. Comics add $13.76 billion. Call it a $27 billion asset base with effectively no tooling layer on top of it.
• The grading fee pool is the sharper number. 26.6 million cards graded in 2025 at a blended $25 to $35 a card is roughly $700m to $900m a year in fees, and PSA's paused Value tiers are pushing that average up hard.
• Volume is not a blip. PSA now grades around 90,000 cards a day, up from 15,000 a day in 2021. Comics tell the same story: CGC and CBCS processed over 500,000 submissions in FY2025, more than four times the ~120,000 of 2019.