Dan Van Tran, CTO at Collectors, reveals how computer vision, cloud platforms and expert AI agents are revolutionising the global collectibles market
COLLECTORS
Dan Van Tran, CTO at Collectors, reveals how computer vision, cloud platforms and expert AI agents are revolutionising the global collectibles market
Collectors is the world leader in authentication and grading for high-value collectibles. Through its Professional Sports Authenticator( PSA), it grades and authenticates trading cards, tickets and memorabilia, and does the same with coins and banknotes through the Professional Coin Grading Service( PCGS). Around that core, it has built services spanning autograph authentication, vaulting and storage, pricing and population data and digital tools like set registries that let collectors track and showcase their collections. The scale is enormous. In recent months, PSA has graded as many as 2.5 million cards in a single month, and it serves everyone from kids opening their first packs to institutional investors.
Before Dan Van Tran joined Collectors to become CTO, he worked at Flatiron Health where he used technology and data to transform how cancer care is being delivered and researched.
“ Flatiron’ s co-founder and CEO is Nat Turner,” Dan says,“ and beyond the day job, Nat and I would nerd out about trading cards whenever we had a chance. So when Nat led the acquisition of Collectors in 2021, along with Steve Cohen, the owner of the Mets, joining was one of the easiest decisions of my life.”
Dan explains that joining the firm was a chance to run the same playbook, take a trust-critical, datarich industry and transform it with technology – this time in a hobby he genuinely loves.
“ The opportunity itself was rare,” he says.“ Collectors is a beloved brand with decades of trust behind it, sitting on the most authoritative data asset in the collectibles market, but it was fundamentally a physical operations business at exactly the moment when technology could be applied to transform it.”
4 psacard. com