CardNexus, the Bordeaux-based mobile-first marketplace and collection platform for trading card game (TCG) enthusiasts, today announced a €3.5 million pre-Seed round to support team expansion.
The round was led by Piton Capital, with participation from Motier, FSJ, OPRTRS, Kima Ventures, Aquiti, and a group of TCG content creators.
“We started CardNexus because we couldn’t find a decent way to manage our own collections across the new games we started playing like Sorcery: Contested Realm. We decided to build from scratch for what collectors need today: one app for every game, with instant card scanning, card collection management, and a marketplace that works natively on your phone,” says Tristan Foureur, co-founder and CEO of CardNexus.
This announcement falls within a context where comparable trading-card marketplace announcements are limited, but funding activity is visible across other specialised marketplaces, resale infrastructure and commerce-enablement software.
Minimist, a Vienna-based technology startup building an AI-powered listing engine for second-hand retailers, closed a €1 million pre-Seed round in March, while Webel, a Madrid-based digital marketplace for home services, previously closed a €4.3 million pre-Series A funding round to accelerate its growth.
The trading card game market is undergoing a significant growth, according to the CardNexus. Riftbound, the League of Legends card game, became a top-three seller within weeks of launch. Dozens of new games enter the market every year, bringing millions of new collectors with them. Yet the platforms that serve this growing community, such as TCGPlayer (now owned by eBay) were built over 15 years ago for a single game, and have not evolved since.
Founded in 2025, CardNexus is designed to be a companion for a collector’s entire hobby, not just a place to buy and sell. The platform combines a peer-to-peer marketplace, AI-powered card scanning, and collection management across 12+ games in a single mobile app.
CardNexus say what sets them apart is their community-led approach, with a public roadmap shaped by user feedback, and an open API that lets developers and local game shops build on top of the platform.
This philosophy of transparency extends to pricing data, platform decisions, and product direction. In a market dominated by closed ecosystems, CardNexus is betting that openness wins.
The company launched their marketplace in March 2026 and now has over 50,000 users on the platform. It supports more than 12 trading card games, with plans to reach 20 by the end of the year. Over 30 million cards have been inventoried by users, including 10 million scanned via the mobile app, with active sellers spanning 30+ countries.
This pre-Seed funding will be used to expand the game catalog, grow the team, and develop the platform’s beyond buying and selling. Over the next two years, CardNexus plans to become the companion app for every stage of a collector’s journey.
CardNexus also plan to build a vault system for secure physical card storage, targeted for 2027, giving collectors a way to store, insure, and trade high-value cards without shipping them back and forth.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/06/french-trading-card-game-platform-cardnexus-raises-e3-5-million-to-support-team-expansion/
