Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Pokémon cards are all the rage right now. The resurgence of the collectible card market has buyers and sellers in a frenzy – some people are even buying, trading, and selling as their full-time job. Because, in some cases, the profit margins are that high. For example, CNN and other outlets reported that Logan Paul sold his ultra-rare PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card at auction for a record-breaking $16.49 million in February 2026.

Kacy Lombard knows the market all too well. He has a Pokémon card collection worth tens of thousands of dollars – which he claims used to be much more before he sold a handful of high-value cards to kickstart his business, DoubleHOLO.

Childhood collecting turned into adult money

“When I got back into collecting in college, my mom dug up my old collection in the attic from when I was a kid,” he said. “It ended up being really valuable.”

Like the stock market, a card’s value changes day to day and sometimes even minute to minute. Several of the cards in Lombard’s childhood collection were from the Wizards of the Coast (WotC) era, which was the first printing company for Pokémon cards before it swapped over to print at Pokémon Company International.

As a general rule: the older the card, the rarer the print, the better the shape – the higher the value.

“I started buying and selling as a side hobby, but it progressed into a very real business. I had my own website and Shopify store and was traveling across the country to card conventions to shop, trade, and sell in-person,” Lombard shared. “My best month was close to $100,000 in revenue.”

Lombard wasn’t playing around. His passion far surpassed hobbyist collecting.

A marketplace of problems

During that time, Lombard became keenly aware of some of the most frustrating hiccups in the business. On the side, he started coding software for a marketplace promoting instant liquidity for buyers and sellers in the collectible space. That was the first rendition of his company, DoubleHOLO.

And he got a fair amount of traction from Google discovery for a specific purchase. But Pokémon buyers who are browsing daily still gravitated toward the legacy sites like eBay, Fanatics, and other traditional mediums.

“A marketplace may be how we started, but now we are focusing on other aspects of our business,” he said.

The thesis of DoubleHOLO: Cards are an alternative asset class

“These cards have become financialized, and some people have turned into trading card investors. There’s institutional money moving into this sector,” Lombard explained. “We imagine a future where you could invest in cards like you would a traditional portfolio.”

Lombard isn’t alone in this thinking. There’s an ever-growing corner of culture that sees Pokémon cards as an alternative asset class.

According to reporting by CNBC, from 2004 to 2020, Pokémon card prices rose 282%, according to an index compiled by a card grading agency, Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA). Since 2020, prices have risen by 1,350%, per the index.

Tracking the trends

However, Lombard believes the infrastructure to support the financialization of Pokémon cards and other collectibles is lacking.

“DoubleHOLO’s vision is to build the market infrastructure and financial rails to power the trading card economy,” he said.

So, the first product offering, following the initial marketplace launch, is a subscription-based data intelligence platform to track trends and notify buyers and sellers of price fluctuations within the collectibles market.

Lombard compared the product to Robinhood or Bloomberg for trading cards – and hopefully, eventually, the broader collectibles market (comic books, watches, sneakers, etc.).

Lombard wants DoubleHOLO to become the place collectors go for insights on card values, market trends, and projections. His Co-founder, Mike Werb, is also the president of PokeNotify, which alerts buyers whenever a retailer restocks its cards. Between the two of them, they carry some pretty extensive industry knowledge.

Building a better business suite

Lombard and Werb are also scaling up a vendor-seller business management suite for inventory tracking, pricing strategy, and simple product listing.

“With our dataset, we’re able to do auto-pricing, removing the time it takes to manually price listings. Instead, you set your pricing rules and configurations, and our system will follow. Then, you can do one-click listings – publishing to eBay, Shopify, Fanatics, the DoubleHOLO marketplace, all of them,” Lombard said. “If the marketplace shifts, those listings would automatically update based on your price configuration, all from one business management suite.”

This method would become particularly helpful for sellers who have thousands of cards in their inventory at any given time.

Lombard said the DoubleHOLO business suite can also give sellers a full financial picture of their portfolio after every sale or show by tracking revenue, profit margin, and inventory value gains from trades.

And one of the features that Lombard is most excited about, which would be part of the business suite, is an AI-driven scanner that can identify cards and their potential value on the spot.

“Let’s say a seller wants to sell their whole collection. They have 200 cards, and they need money. Situations like this happen all the time,” Lombard said. “It would take hours to price out all those cards. But a scanner can do it in minutes, comparing the cards to real-time online data and trends.”

The trajectory of DoubleHOLO

DoubleHOLO has grown organically through bootstrapping, thanks to Lombard and his co-founders, Werb and Justin Yu, who serves as the company’s CTO.

“By late spring of this year, our revenue had grown a lot. The user base had grown a lot. We were seeing around $250,000 in annual recurring revenue, had onboarded about 40,000-50,000 users, and had more than 80,000 app downloads,” Lombard said, exemplifying the traction.

Brickyard in Chattanooga cut one of the first checks. Two other venture capital firms – one in San Francisco and another in Atlanta–quickly followed in step.

“I would encourage people to really just take risks in their lives. With the progression of agentic coding and AI, it’s really such a low barrier to entry to be successful,” he said. “Take the leap of faith.”

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