What Is StarStock?

StarStockis a New York-based company founded in 2019 by Scott Greenberg and Mike Kuchera, pitched from the start as a "stock market for sports cards." Greenberg had been buying and selling cards on eBay as a side hustle and got frustrated with the friction — shipping delays, fees on every resale, no way to move fast — and set out to build something closer to a trading platform. A meeting with FanDuel cofounder Nigel Eccles connected him to Kuchera, a former FanDuel employee, and the two built StarStock around one core idea: cards live in a vault, and only the digital record of ownership moves when a trade happens.

• Cards go into StarStock's vault first. Sellers ship cards in; StarStock's team authenticates them and, for raw submissions, can grade them before listing.
• Listings trade on the marketplace, not by auction. Sellers set an asking price and buyers can make offers, closer to a normal buy-it-now marketplace than a stock exchange order book — the "stock market" framing is about liquidity and instant settlement, not a literal bid/ask ledger.
• Ownership transfers instantly on a sale.Because the card is already sitting in the vault, a completed trade doesn't trigger a shipment — the buyer owns the card immediately and can resell it the same way, with no reshipping delay between trades.
• Both graded and raw cards are supported.A raw card can be vaulted and traded as-is or sent through StarStock's own grading before listing.
• Withdrawal ships the physical card out.As with any vaulting model, pulling a card off the platform means requesting physical delivery, which ends its marketplace eligibility until it's sent back in.

StarStock advertises no fees for storage, buying, or cash withdrawals. The cost sits on the sell side: an 8% seller fee is deducted from the sale price at the moment a card sells, with a $0.05 minimum per transaction, plus a flat $0.25 ingestion fee when a card is first submitted to the vault. Accounts that go inactive — no buy or sell order in six months — can be charged a $5 monthly maintenance fee against the in-app balance. Fee structures on any trading platform change over time, so confirm current numbers on StarStock's own FAQ before consigning.

StarStock raised a $1.3 million seed round in 2020 that drew attention partly because of its investor list — NBA star Kevin Durant was among the backers — then followed with an $8 million Series A in April 2021 led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with NBA guard Trae Young also participating. That put total disclosed funding at roughly $11.6 million across two rounds, a modest raise next to marketplace-scale competitors but enough to fund the vault, grading, and trading infrastructure the platform runs on.

• vs. eBay.eBay is an open auction/fixed-price marketplace where every sale ships from the seller's hands to the buyer's. StarStock keeps the card vaulted so back-to-back trades settle without a single shipment, which is the exact friction Greenberg started the company to remove.
• vs. COMC. COMC works on a similar vault-and-sell model — cards sit in COMC's warehouse and buyers can purchase without shipping — but COMC has been operating far longer and lists a much larger inventory across all sports and eras. StarStock leans harder into the trading-platform framing and its own in-house grading pipeline.
• vs. MySlabs. MySlabs is a marketplace for cards that are already professionally graded and typically ships physically on each sale. StarStock vaults cards itself (raw or graded) and settles trades digitally, closer to the eBay Vault / Arena Club model than a listings-only marketplace.

• Liquidity is platform-bound.Fast, no-shipping trades only happen between StarStock users on StarStock — moving a card elsewhere means withdrawing and shipping it first, same as any vaulting service.
• The 8% seller fee applies on every sale, including a card that trades hands multiple times without ever leaving the vault — frequent flipping compounds that cost faster than it would on a platform with a flat listing fee.
• In-house grading and authentication are StarStock's own calls,not a third-party grader like PSA or BGS — worth understanding how a StarStock grade is presented and whether it carries the same resale recognition elsewhere.
• It's a smaller platform than eBay or COMC, so depth of buyers for a specific card can vary more than on the largest marketplaces.

Confirm the exact card with Identify & Research — free-path first (on-device OCR, catalog match, and fingerprints). For the general mechanics of vault-based, no-shipping trading, see What Is Sports Card Vaulting? For other platforms built the same way, see What Is eBay Vault? and What Is Arena Club?, or open the full guides library.