NextGem

AI-driven discovery for rare sports cards

NextGem was founded in January 2021 with a simple idea: make it easier for collectors to showcase, discover, and connect over rare sports cards. The app combined sleek scanning tools, personalized profiles, and a social feed to highlight standout inventory.

By unifying inventory scattered across offline shops, Instagram posts, and traditional marketplaces, NextGem aimed to tap into the $14 billion sports card reseller market and create a single place where collectors and sellers could come together.

Collectors quickly embraced the experience, drawn to the platform’s clean design and the sense of community it offered, a welcome change from static forums and clunky marketplaces.

Pulling the Business Back on Track

As excitement cooled, the company began to face real challenges: slowing growth, rising costs, and no clear way to make money. Derrick Fountain stepped in as CEO to steady the ship and figure out what the business needed to survive.

The first step was to simplify. Engineering moved to an on-demand model, cloud infrastructure was reworked, and every nonessential expense was cut. These changes significantly reduced burn while keeping the platform stable, buying time to rethink the roadmap.

From there, the focus turned to the demand side. The team built features to keep buyers engaged, like curated collections, personalized drop alerts, and event-driven promos — especially around the National Sports Collectors Convention.

One of the most ambitious efforts was building an AI-powered ingestion engine that automatically pulled high-value card posts from Instagram, enriched them with metadata, and alerted users when cards matched their interests. Hosted at fetch.nextgem.com, this gave collectors real-time visibility into the best inventory as it surfaced online.

Winding Things Down

Even with these improvements, most deals continued to happen off-platform. Engagement was up, but it wasn’t translating into retained value for NextGem. With competition rising and collector fatigue setting in, scaling the business became increasingly difficult.

Rather than push forward unsustainably, the decision was made to wind down NextGem responsibly. The process was handled transparently: outreach to potential acquirers, closing the loop with investors and users, and giving collectors tools to export and preserve their digital collections.

While the platform ultimately closed, the journey showed what’s possible when technology and great design come together — and what it takes to make tough calls when markets shift. NextGem’s story is one of bold ideas, relentless iteration, and a deep respect for the collector community it set out to serve.