{"id":478869,"date":"2026-09-29T02:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T02:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/478869\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T02:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T02:08:12","slug":"undergrad-team-launches-tash-an-investment-platform-for-trading-cards-haas-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/478869\/","title":{"rendered":"Undergrad team launches tash, an investment platform for trading cards – Haas News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tash is building portfolios of investment-grade trading cards\u2014indexes that people can invest in.<\/p>\n

\"fourL-R: Tash founders Nicolas Sharma, Victor Shammas, John Ohannesian, and Nathan Borshell pitching at Y Combinator Summer 2026 Demo Day.<\/p>\n

Startup tash is building the infrastructure required for investing in trading cards.
\nTash was recently accepted into the prestigious Summer 2026 Y Combinator accelerator program.
\nThe undergrad alumni founders have raised a pre-seed round.<\/p>\n

Long before Victor Shammas<\/a>, BS 26, and Nico Sharma<\/a>, BS\/BA 26, started thinking about trading cards as an asset class, they were collecting for the joy of it.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t until years later, as Haas undergraduates, that they saw a business opportunity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By then, trading cards had matured into a $15 to $50 billion market\u2014depending on whether you include retail card sales and games only or the wider secondary market of services and grading. The students discovered that the infrastructure for investing in trading cards wasn\u2019t included in those estimates.<\/p>\n

To bridge that gap, Shammas and Sharma, along with UC Berkeley co-founders John Ohanessian<\/a> and Nathan Borshell<\/a> started tash<\/a>, an investment platform for trading cards. The startup\u2019s name is a nod to taash\u2014meaning \u201ccards\u201d in Hindi\/Urdu\u2014says Sharma, who was partial to collecting soccer cards.<\/p>\n

\"\"Tash is building professionally- selected indexes of the world\u2019s most iconic trading cards, like this Mickey Mantle card featured on its website.<\/p>\n

Cards are one of the few collectible categories where scarcity can be measured, the founders said. Grading companies\u2019 population reports show how many copies of a particular card have been graded, while transaction histories provide the data on what those cards have sold for.<\/p>\n

But investing in cards remains largely inaccessible to people without the capital, expertise, or time to build a collection themselves. Investors must research and price cards, authenticate purchases, arrange storage and insurance, track their value, and eventually find buyers when they want to sell. Tash is building the infrastructure to simplify this process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re building portfolios of investment-grade trading cards\u2014indexes people can invest in,\u201d Sharma explained. \u201cInstead of buying one card yourself, you can invest in a diversified portfolio of high-end cards.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For now, tash is targeting accredited investors who may not have the time or expertise to build their own portfolios. The company is also working toward becoming SEC-regulated, which the founders hope will allow them to reach retail investors who want exposure to the market without having to invest large amounts in individual cards.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur main vision is to make investing in trading cards as intuitive as investing in an ETF would be,\u201d Shammas said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Summer at Y Combinator<\/p>\n

Tash is gaining traction. The startup was accepted into the prestigious Summer 2026 Y Combinator accelerator program and also raised a pre-seed round, which Shammas said gave the team the resources to commit to building the company full time.<\/p>\n

Shammas and Sharma also credit their Haas experience with helping them reach that milestone. They pointed to professional faculty members Jonathan Heyne<\/a> and Bill Fanning<\/a>, whose respective startup and growth marketing courses connected them with venture capitalists and experienced marketing executives.<\/p>\n

Further down the line, they see an opportunity to bring trading cards into institutional portfolios, making the asset class more accessible to wealth managers and other professional investors.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur way of thinking about this is, \u2018Let\u2019s not flip cards anymore, we\u2019ve done enough of that,\u2019\u201d Shammas said. \u201cLet\u2019s actually treat this as an asset class and prove that our thesis is right.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tash is building portfolios of investment-grade trading cards\u2014indexes that people can invest in. L-R: Tash founders Nicolas Sharma,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[98040,1979,181102,143,145,144,8170],"class_list":["post-478869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-entrepreneurship-innovation","tag-latest-news","tag-master-of-financial-engineering","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}