CardNexus raises €3.5 million in pre-seed funding

It started with a spreadsheet

A couple of years ago, Gaultier put a Sorcery: Contested Realm deck in my hands. I'd played TCGs as a kid, drifted away, and that game pulled me right back in. Within weeks I had binders. Within months I had a problem: there was no decent way to track any of it. Sorcery was too new, too niche. So I did what every collector does. I opened a spreadsheet.

Gaultier had been living this for 25 years: as a player, a collector, and a pro seller with thousands of sales behind him. Julie came in through Lorcana, like so many people discovering the hobby for the first time. Three different paths into the same wall: the tools we all relied on were built fifteen years ago, for one game, for the desktop era. Meanwhile collectors today play three, four, five games. They manage real money in cardboard. And they're doing it across spreadsheets and platforms that don't talk to each other.

The side project we built to track our own collections refused to stay a side project. That's how CardNexus happened.

Today's news

Today I get to share something I'm genuinely proud of: CardNexus has raised €3.5 million in pre-seed funding, led by Piton Capital, with Motier, Financière St James, OPRTRS, Kima Ventures, Aquiti, F4 - and a group of angels and TCG content creators who decided to put their own money into the platform they use.

I want to be honest about what this money is, though. A fundraise is not an achievement. It's fuel. The achievement belongs to you.

What you built

We launched the marketplace in March. Fifteen months ago CardNexus didn't exist. Today:

• More than 50,000 of you are on the platform, and you've inventoried over 30 million cards - with 10 million of them scanned through the mobile app.
• Sellers in 30+ countries are trading across more than 12 games, with one foot in Europe and one in North America, something that has never really existed in this hobby.
• In April, you listed one million cards in a single month. And the million came in before we'd even finished shipping the features meant to help you get there. You were listing late at night and early in the morning, in whatever time you could find.

Every number on that list is yours, not ours. We just built the shelves. You filled them.

Why now

This hobby is having the biggest moment of its existence. Riftbound's debut set outsold everything last quarter except the newest Magic and Pokémon releases. One Piece rewrote the hierarchy. PSA graded more cards in 2025 than in any year in its history. A Pikachu sold for $16.5 million in February. Dozens of new games launch every year, each bringing a wave of collectors who have never known anything but their phone.

And yet the infrastructure of the hobby hasn't moved. The market grew up; the platforms didn't. We think the next decade of this hobby deserves better than tools designed when flip phones were still a thing. We also think the way to build it is in the open: public roadmap, community votes, an API anyone can use. In a market dominated by closed ecosystems, we're betting that openness wins.

What's next

The funding goes to three things:

• More games. We're at 12+, heading for 20 by the end of the year. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball, Gundam... we hear you.
• A marketplace that feels like trading with people, not a checkout page. The best second-hand platforms outside our hobby figured this out years ago: you message the seller, you negotiate, you make an offer, you build a reputation. TCG marketplaces never caught up, buying a card still feels like ordering printer ink. We're bringing those standards to cards: messaging, offers and bargaining, profiles you're proud of, and the social layer a community-driven hobby deserves: all on top of the most secure and robust foundation we can build, in an experience that actually feels like 2026 on your phone. Trading cards has always been social. The platforms just forgot.
• An open platform. Our public API ships at the end of this month. Not gated, not enterprise-only. If you want to build a deck tool, a price tracker, or an integration for your local game shop, the door is open. The best ideas in this hobby have always come from the community; we'd be foolish to pretend otherwise.

The longer arc. Pro sellers joining the marketplace, the full store in your pocket, more shipping options, more countries covered and - further out, targeted for 2027- a vault: secure storage, insurance, and instant trades for the cards you'd rather never ship.

I'll say plainly what I've said in interviews: we're opening the floodgates, and things will go wrong. Features will break. We'll ship fixes at 2 a.m. and tell you exactly what happened. That's the deal, you give us your trust and your feedback, we give you transparency and speed.

Thank you

To the first users who scanned their bulk boxes when CardNexus was held together with tape. To the sellers who listed their first card ever with us. To the Discord regulars who argue about the roadmap (keep going). To Gaultier and Julie, and to our investors for backing a team of collectors who got tired of waiting for someone else to build this.

We set out to make the home this hobby deserves. One million listings, 50,000 collectors, and €3.5 million later, it still feels like day zero.

See you on CardNexus.

Tristan