A Startup Built Robots to Sort 10 Million Trading Cards Because Mt. Rainier Was Disappearing

Matt Lubbers walked into his friend Tim Clothier's house in the Seattle area and noticed something unusual. The living room had a view of Mount Rainier. Or rather, it would have, if approximately 7 million trading cards weren't in the way.

Lubbers, who had spent 15 years building computer vision systems for autonomous vehicles and self-flying drones at companies like Amazon Robotics and Zipline, asked Clothier a question that would become a company: "What do you think technology could do for you?"

Clothier had done the math. Sorting his collection by hand at roughly 25,000 cards per week, he was looking at a 15-year project. So they built robots instead.

Eight Robots, Three Supercomputers, One Very Specific Problem

Gradient Collects, based in Renton, Washington — across the hall from Seattle Sounders FC headquarters — now operates eight custom-built robotic sorters that can process up to 100,000 cards per day. The machines rapidly move each card to a flatbed scanner that captures the back while overhead cameras photograph the front. Every card gets physically and digitally cataloged.

The images feed into three custom supercomputers, each running six GPUs, which identify and score cards against a database of 30 million known variants. That's 500,000 images processed daily. The system currently houses about 10 million cards on-site, with room for three times that.

The CTO building this is Lubbers, whose resume reads like a robotics highlight reel: ZF Group, Faraday Future, Voyage, Amazon Robotics, Zipline. The CEO is Clothier, who before this ran a company called Illusion Projects Inc. that built custom illusions and special effects for Disney and Cirque du Soleil. If you're looking for a founding team that was always going to end up building something unusual, this is it.

The Business Model

Gradient isn't just sorting cards for fun. Customers ship in their collections — their largest single customer sent over 500,000 cards — and get a web portal where they can sort, filter, and track real-time market values. When they want to sell, a single click lists the card to Gradient's eBay store, and Gradient handles storage, fulfillment, and shipping.

Pricing starts at 40 cents per card on the pay-as-you-go tier. Subscribers get steeper discounts: the Pro plan at $29.99 per month includes a 40% processing discount and handles up to 30,000 cards. The Commercial tier at $99.99 per month serves customers with up to 100,000 cards and includes expedited processing.

The startup has raised $6 million, mostly from friends and family. Adrian Hanauer, majority owner of the Seattle Sounders, is among the investors — which explains the office location. The target market is not small: the U.S. trading card industry is a $15 billion business.

They're Not Alone

Gradient is attacking the problem from the center — build a facility, bring the cards to the robots. In Calgary, a company called TCG Machines took the opposite approach: build the robots, send them to the card shops.

TCG Machines sells a device called the PhyzBatch-9000 (pronounced "fizz-batch"), which sorts 60 cards per minute using cameras and proprietary computer vision. Founder Graeme Gordon started the company after spending 24 hours over three days manually sorting his own collection, at which point his roommate suggested, reasonably, that he should build a machine.

Gordon called 200 card stores across North America. Over 90% said they'd buy a sorting machine. He didn't take a salary for seven years while developing the technology. Today, TCG Machines operates in hundreds of stores across 14 countries, and their deployed fleet processes more than one million cards per day. Revenue has doubled annually for five consecutive years.

As Gordon noted, even a million cards a day is "barely a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of billions of new trading cards produced each year."

Why This Matters Beyond the Hobby

Strip away the nostalgia and what you've got is a genuine B2B technology story. Gradient is applying industrial computer vision and robotics to a fragmented, analog market — the same pattern that automated warehouse logistics, quality inspection in manufacturing, and document processing in financial services.

The specific item being sorted is a baseball card. But the technology stack — custom robotics, high-speed imaging, GPU-accelerated classification against millions of reference variants, and a consignment marketplace on top — would be familiar to any enterprise operations team.

It just happens to have started because a guy couldn't see Mount Rainier from his couch.