What Is Ludex?

Ludexis a free mobile app, founded in February 2021 by Brian Ludden and Heather Denniston in Chicago, that uses AI image recognition to identify a sports or TCG card from a phone camera photo — baseball, football, basketball, Pokémon, and Magic: The Gathering are all supported — and return a price estimate almost instantly, pulled from recent sold listings. Every card scanned gets saved into a running digital collection inside the app, and Ludex layers a marketplace on top so a scanned card can be listed for sale without re-entering it anywhere else. The company says it has more than 3 million users and has raised roughly $13.3 million across three funding rounds, including backing from former Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher.

• Point the camera at the card.Ludex's AI reads the card — player, set, year, and parallel where visible — and matches it against its card database, similar in spirit to the identify flow GCS uses to price a physical card without typing the set name in by hand.
• It returns a value estimate with the ID. The match comes back with an estimated market value based on recent sold comps, so one scan answers both "what is this card" and "roughly what's it worth."
• Scans build a collection automatically. Every card scanned is saved to a Ludex profile, so the app functions as a running inventory of everything owned, without a separate spreadsheet.
• The collection feeds a marketplace. A card in the digital collection can be listed for sale directly inside Ludex, rather than exporting the list to eBay or another site to sell it.

Ludex was founded in February 2021 by Brian Ludden, who serves as CEO, and Heather Denniston, who serves as co-founder, COO, and president, out of Chicago. The company raised roughly $5.3 million in its first funding round the year it launched, with former NFL linebacker and card collector Brian Urlacher among the original investors, and has gone on to raise about $13.3 million total across three rounds. Ludex markets itself as an AI-scanning platform for both sports cards and trading card games, positioning the scan-and-value tool as the free on-ramp to its paid features and marketplace.

• Same core pitch, different companies. CollX and Ludex both use a phone-camera scan to identify a card and estimate its value, then build a digital collection and offer an in-app marketplace to sell what's been scanned — the two apps compete directly on scan speed and accuracy rather than on a different business model.
• Both cover TCGs, not just sports.Ludex and CollX each support Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering alongside baseball, football, and basketball, so a mixed collection of sports and TCG cards doesn't need two separate apps.
• A camera-based value estimate is a starting point. Like any automated comp tool, treat the in-app estimate as a fast first read and confirm against actual recent sold listings before pricing a card to sell, especially on anything scarce, graded, or high-value — see How Much Are My Sports Cards Worth?

Confirm the exact card with Identify & Research — free-path first (on-device OCR, catalog match, and fingerprints). For other ways to identify a card that's not obvious from the front, see How to Identify a Sports Card. For the closest competing scan app, see What Is CollX? . Ludex and CollX both scan a card you already own — for a digital-only card app where the cards never exist physically, see What Is Topps BUNT?, or open the full guides library.