In February, a remarkable collaboration took place. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian joined forces with Brent Montgomery, the producer of "Pawn Stars," and Evan Parker, the former general manager at The Athletic. Together, they launched Mantel, a unique social network designed specifically for collectors. This platform enables them to share their latest acquisitions, ranging from sports cards and trading card games (TCGs) to comic books, coins, stamps, sneakers, watches, and much more.

Mobile App Launch: Making Connecting Easier

Initially accessible only on the web, Mantel made a significant move by launching its mobile app on Wednesday. This provides collectors with a more convenient way to connect with like-minded enthusiasts. Now available for download on both the App Store and Google Play, Mantel offers a dedicated space for collectors to immerse themselves in their hobby. Whether it's celebrating the thrill of the hunt or seeking advice from fellow enthusiasts on various topics such as grading sports cards and discussing market trends, Mantel has it all.

Notable Features

One of the standout features of Mantel is "Mantelpiece," a digital display case that allows users to showcase their favorite collectibles. This not only helps them attract attention for potential trades but also adds a visual element to the platform. The app also incorporates gamification elements like streaks, polls, and badges, making the collecting experience more engaging. In addition to the main feed where users can discover posts from other collectors, there is a wide variety of content available, including market reports and insights from industry influencers.

Groups Feature: Niche Communities

Alongside the app launch, Mantel introduced a "Groups" feature. This allows users to invite members to groups based on their specific niche interests, such as "NBA Junk Wax" or "Vintage Non-Sports Cards." Currently, this feature is only available on the web, but it will soon be rolled out to iOS and Android devices in the coming weeks. It provides collectors with a way to connect with others who share their particular passion within the collecting world.

Position in the Collectibles Market

The collectibles market is a massive $493 billion industry, and there are many collecting apps available. However, most of these apps focus primarily on sales. This can deter some collectors who are more interested in simply displaying their finds and meeting new friends. Mantel aims to serve a niche group of hardcore enthusiasts who prefer to keep their collecting activities separate from mainstream platforms. As co-founder and CEO Parker told TechCrunch, "There's nothing great in the collectible space for [sharing] content. I don't see anybody in the collectible space doing what we're doing."

Trading and Selling on Mantel

Trading and selling are permitted on Mantel's platform, but the emphasis is on community and sharing. In 2025, the app will launch a Stripe integration and private messaging to facilitate sales between users. However, there are no plans to develop an in-app marketplace as the industry is already crowded with competitors like eBay and CardsHQ.

Founding Team and Investors

The trio behind Mantel created the platform out of their shared passion for collecting. Parker, with his "collector's gene," has a diverse collection ranging from sports cards and memorabilia to toys and watches. After leaving The Athletic, he met Ohanian and Montgomery, who shared his enthusiasm. As Parker explained, "Alexis is a massive collector, and Brent is someone who grew up selling baseball cards to make money in school. Then he came up with the idea for 'Pawn Stars' and spent his career on the content side, much of it related to the collecting world. [Mantel] is great for community, and Alexis knows that better than anyone from his Reddit world." In addition to a strong founding team, Mantel is backed by notable investors such as Courtside Ventures, Cosmic Venture Partners, Steve Aoki's Aoki Labs, Switch Ventures, VaynerFund, along with former WNBA player Candace Parker and Adam Hansmann, the co-founder of The Athletic. Ohanian's SevenSevenSix and Montgomery's Wheelhouse Entertainment also invested in the platform.

User Activity and Monetization

Mantel did not disclose the exact number of users but mentioned that it has thousands of them. On average, these users make more than 30 comments or posts each month and engage with content over 100 times monthly. The platform also boasts "tens of thousands" of posts. While the app is free to download, the company is considering various monetization options such as advertising and placing certain Groups behind a paywall.

The global translation service market holds a significant value, estimated to be around $40 billion by various analysts. Within this vast market, enterprise services play a crucial role. Meanwhile, for consumers, apps like Google Translate and Apple Translate have gained dominance, yet they lack the capability to handle calls and voice messages effectively.

EzDubs: Transforming Person-to-Person Translation

Y Combinator-backed EzDubs aims to address the issue of person-to-person translation through its innovative app. This app supports translation for calls, voice messages, and text in over 30 languages. It was founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar. Krishnamurthy and Kinagi first met during college in Hong Kong and built a project that read lips and translated speech into text for those with hearing loss. In 2021, they moved to Columbia University and began working on video dubbing. There, they met Nassar, who was leading Cisco's Speech AI Group while pursuing a master's degree part-time. Nassar had extensive experience in real-time speech AI products and later created Voicea, which was sold to Cisco. The trio officially started building EzDubs in 2023 with a dubbing model and an early version of a translation tool.The company initially launched a Twitter/X bot in January 2023 that translated clips on the platform. This bot has amassed over 340,000 followers and receives more than 500 dub requests daily, with translated videos getting over a million daily views. In July 2023, they launched a bot on WhatsApp, enabling users to translate voice messages and videos. However, users had to forward voice messages to the bot, get the reply translated, and then send it back. To overcome this, they decided to build their own app and released an early version this year.Krishnamurthy emphasized that partners at Y Combinator advised them that if they could solve the problem of communication latency in different languages, a communication platform would have a more significant downstream effect than video. This led them to opt for building a communication app instead of focusing solely on video dubbing.The EzDubs app, available on iOS and Android, offers real-time translation for calls with support for 30 languages. Users can call someone speaking a different language and receive an instant translation. The other person doesn't need to have the EzDubs app. The app also provides translation for text, voice, and video messages.Although users can share translated voice or video messages outside the app using a link, the founders believe that for those communicating in multiple languages, platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage are not sufficient. EzDubs has noted that many people use their app to make hundreds of calls daily, with an average call time of 17 minutes. The top use cases include people dating across cultures and professionals communicating with locals while abroad.At the core, EzDubs has two main models: one for voice cloning while maintaining the conveyed emotions and another for translation. The translation model is designed to handle interruptions and doesn't wait for a person to finish a whole sentence before starting internal translation.EzDubs has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway founded by ex-WhatsApp CBO Neeraj Arora. Other participants include Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Replit president Michele Catasta, Applied Intuition's CEO Qasar Younis, and a16z-backed cloud startup Replicate's CEO Ben Fishman.Friedman pointed out that the company is on a path to making translation tools easily accessible to users. He believes in the product due to the founders' rich history in speech and language learning. He added that even within a company, there are language barriers that can hinder efficient communication, and EzDubs can remove these barriers.The company is soon launching a feature that allows users to scan a QR code and initiate an EzDubs call instantly without downloading the app. The founders stated that while apps like Google Translate have a real-time mode, it requires passing the phone back and forth. Eventually, they aim to make EzDubs a default phone calling app to handle incoming calls as well.In the coming months, EzDubs plans to build an extension for apps like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack.