(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. is investing in sports-card marketplace Dibbs, entering a booming collectibles industry as interest rises in alternative assets.
The fresh funding comes as Dibbs starts a new service that allows users to buy and sell fractions of trading cards. Dibbs previously raised about $16 million from venture firms Foundry Group, Tusk Venture Partners, Courtside Ventures and Founder Collective. It also has a group of athlete investors, including the NBA’s Chris Paul and Kevin Love. Financial terms of Amazon’s involvement weren’t disclosed.
Dibbs, founded in 2020, started by listing cards for members to trade in fractions by digitizing them through nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, allowing them to own pieces of high-value collectibles that would be otherwise unattainable. If a collector acquires 100% of an asset, they can take physical possession of it as well.
Chief Executive Officer Evan Vandenberg said Dibbs will soon expand into card games like Pokemon and Magic and is considering its first non-card categories.
“Cards are one thing that we do, but it’s one thing,” Vandenberg said in an interview. “This can be so much bigger than cards.”
A new service, Sell With Dibbs, lets customers monetize their own cards after details are verified and the physical card is sent to the company to be insured and placed in a vault. Then the item is added to the user’s account and they’re given control of pricing and quantity. Dibbs takes a flat 2.9% fee off each transaction.
Collectibles haven’t traditionally been an area of focus for Amazon. E-commerce rival eBay Inc. is a longtime leader in the sector with more than $2 billion worth of trading cards sold on the site in the first six months of the year.
Representatives for Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
