Sports Card Marketplace Raises $8 Million as Trae Young Invests
Online sports card marketplace StarStock has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with angel investors including Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and BetMGM COO Ryan Spoon.
Founded in November 2019, StarStock has risen alongside the boom in sports card interest over the last year. Sellers send cards to the company to hold in a secure location, allowing for instant transactions. CEO Scott Greenberg said sign-ups and card submissions grew 500% between November 2020 and this January. StarStock is now nearing a million cards in its vault, with 50,000 added weekly.
The funding will help StarStock process more cards as it moves to a larger facility. StarStock inspectors score incoming cards on an A-B-C rubric. Grading leader PSA recently suspended many of its submission services to work through its backlog, with PSA president Steve Sloan saying the company received more cards in three days than it had in the previous three months.
Greenberg also noted that the company has seen a major increase in the number of sealed boxes of unopened cards StarStock has received—roughly 1,000 boxes. “People don’t trust themselves not to open the boxes,” he said, explaining the increase. “They love getting boxes and sending them to us so they don’t open it when they are bored.” Others have bought the boxes not to open them but as an investment.
New dollars will also go toward product improvements. StarStock is working on new ways for users to show and share their collections, with a native mobile app on the way.
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