Four UC Berkeley graduates have created a startup where individuals can invest in collectible trading cards. The startup, named Tash, buys different trading cards and allows users to buy and sell shares of the cards such as stocks or other securities.<\/p>\n
The company raised a pre-seed round of $500,000 through Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. Because the company sells shares in securities, it is yet to gain approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p>\n
On Y Combinator\u2019s website, the startup describes itself as the \u201cBlackRock of collectibles.\u201d The company was a part of the accelerator\u2019s summer 2026 batch.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe create these baskets of collectibles, starting with trading cards, and we skin them in fairly thematic ways, whether it\u2019s a team, an athlete, a character, a franchise, you name it,\u201d said Nathan Borshell, a co-founder at Tash. \u201cI think there\u2019s a modern shift from being interested in Apple or Nvidia to saying, \u2018Hey, I might not know too much about Apple stock, but I feel really confident about the upcoming NBA rookie class.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Borshell said the startup fills a gap for sports fans, allowing them to bet on the long-term prospects of teams and players instead of short-term, absolute bets. Trading cards typically hold at least some of their value in the long term, regardless of the featured player\u2019s performance, according to Borshell.<\/p>\n
Tash will buy and store the physical cards, then split the baskets into shares. They will sell these shares to buyers and then run a secondary marketplace for investors to trade with one another using marketable items such as other investment products. Tash will collect a fee from this secondary market and from personal accounts themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s big, it\u2019s gotten really hot,\u201d Borshell said, referring to the trading card market. \u201cI think it got super popular during COVID. People were stuck inside and then it was basically a way for them to gamble. Sports were kind of shut down aside from the UFC. You have companies like Fanatics pouring billions of dollars a year into the space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three of the four founders knew one another from high school and met co-founder Nicolas Sharma during their freshman year at UC Berkeley, Borshell said. Sharma and fellow co-founder Victor Shammas are Haas School of Business graduates.<\/p>\n
In addition to its pre-seed round, Borshell says the company has completed its seed round of funding. The amount of funding and investors gained during that round have yet to be announced.<\/p>\n
Borshell said he wants the company to expand outside of the traditional trading card market.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if a good amount of capital comes from high-net-worth individuals and institutional capital,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we limit ourselves to people that are interested in trading cards, then we have failed. The goal is, create a product that appeases your sports fans, your Disney fans, your Harry Potter fans, anyone that has any opinion on anything culturally relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four UC Berkeley graduates have created a startup where individuals can invest in collectible trading cards. The startup,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[6856,3588,88687,37195,190023,129,190025,10651,143,145,144,190024,190026,29331],"class_list":["post-486176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-apple","tag-disney","tag-fanatics","tag-harry-potter","tag-nathan-borshell","tag-nba","tag-nicolas-sharma","tag-nvidia","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-tash","tag-victor-shammas","tag-y-combinator"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486176","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=486176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}