At Fanatics Fest in New York this past July, Tom Brady walked up to Phillies manager Don Mattingly and told him about a binder. “Since I was seven years old, I only wanted Don Mattingly cards,” Brady said. “The front of my binder was you. All the pages, the laminated pages, the plastic, were Don Mattingly cards.”
It’s a charming story. It’s also the least interesting thing about CardVault, the trading card chain Brady now half owns.
The interesting part is the paperwork. When Fanatics founder Michael Rubin pitched Chris Costa in July 2024 on opening a single card store with Brady attached, Brady came back with a different answer. “I don’t want to do a store,” he told Costa. “I want to open all of them with you guys.” By February 2025 he owned half the company. It had three locations.
Eighteen months later it has 17.
CardVault by Tom Brady is a national sports-card and collectibles retail chain in which Brady holds a 50% ownership stake, cofounded with Chris Costa and Randy Greenstein, now operating 17 US stores with a stated target of 100. Most retired athletes rent their name to somebody else’s company for a fee. Brady bought half of one and went to work. The gap between those two structures is worth real money, and it’s a decision founders face from the other side of the table every time they consider bringing a famous name into a cap table.
Last updated: August 2026
Quick answers
How many CardVault stores are there?
CardVault by Tom Brady operates 17 US locations as of August 2026, up from three when Brady bought in during February 2025. The company opened its 17th store in Palo Alto, California, plans six more by 2027, and targets 40 stores by 2028 on the way to more than 100.
Does Tom Brady actually own CardVault?
Yes. Brady holds a 50% ownership stake, not a licensing or endorsement arrangement. He cofounded the current entity in 2024 alongside Chris Costa and Randy Greenstein, who launched the original CardVault in 2020. His name is on the business because he owns half of it.
Is CardVault by Tom Brady legit?
CardVault is an established retailer with 17 physical stores, a grading submission service, and a live-streaming break business. Costa told Front Office Sports that every store is profitable to date. Card pricing at any retail shop carries a premium over private sales, so collectors comparing prices should check recent sales data before buying.
How many CardVault stores does Tom Brady own?
CardVault by Tom Brady runs 17 stores as of August 2026, and Brady owns half of every one of them. The 17th opened in Palo Alto, roughly 20 minutes from the San Mateo hobby shop where Brady bought Mattingly cards as a kid. Costa told Front Office Sports the company plans six more by 2027, 40 by 2028, and eventually more than 100.
The pace matters more than the number. Fourteen of those 17 stores opened after Brady joined, which means the chain roughly sextupled its footprint in a year and a half. Retail expansion at that speed usually burns cash, and plenty of celebrity-backed chains have opened fast and closed faster. Costa’s claim is that CardVault hasn’t hit that wall: every store is profitable to date.
The original business looks nothing like the current one. Costa and Randy Greenstein started CardVault in 2020 after running into each other on a Nantucket beach, pairing Costa’s box-break operation with the video production and marketing teams from Greenstein’s hospitality company, Big Night. Their first store opened inside Gillette Stadium in October 2021, while Brady was still playing in Tampa. Connecticut and Boston followed. Three stores in four years.
Then Brady bought in, and the company started opening stores at roughly one a month.
What CardVault sells and where the money comes from
CardVault reported 400% revenue growth from 2025 to 2026, and that growth comes from four distinct lines, not just cards on a shelf. The stores sell sports cards, Pokémon and other trading card products, memorabilia, and card grading submissions. On top of the retail floor sits CardVault Breaks, a live-streaming business where customers buy a “spot” tied to a specific team or player and watch a box get opened in real time.
That mix is the actual business model, and it’s worth understanding because each line behaves differently. Retail card sales are inventory-heavy and margin-thin. Grading submissions are a service fee with almost no inventory risk. Breaks convert a physical product into scheduled live entertainment, which means the same box of cards generates attention, a customer relationship, and revenue at once.
Pokémon turns out to be one of the top sellers, which is why Brady’s role extends past ribbon-cutting. Costa said Brady personally worked the phones to improve CardVault’s Pokémon allocation. That’s a supply-chain problem solved with a phone call from a seven-time Super Bowl winner, and it’s the kind of thing an endorsement contract never buys.
The timing helps. The trading card industry sat at roughly $10 billion to $14 billion in market size before the pandemic and reached about $50 billion in 2026, according to reporting in the New York Post. Card Ladder, which tracks sales data across the hobby, put sports card sales at $676 million in May 2026, a 10% jump over April, then $695 million in June.
Brady is also buying inside his own category, which is either a conflict or a signal depending on how you read it. He recently bought a rare autographed rookie card of Raiders quarterback Fernando Mendoza. He owns a piece of the Raiders too.
Why Brady took equity instead of an endorsement check
Brady’s endorsement portfolio is enormous and it has produced exactly zero transferable assets. Pizza Hut, Dunkin’, Hertz, Subway, Ferrero, Delta, Oakley, T-Mobile, IWC Schaffhausen, Duracell: every one of those deals pays a fee for a window of time and then ends. When the contract expires, Brady owns nothing.
The CardVault structure does the opposite. A 50% stake means Brady captures the enterprise value the chain builds, and it means the brand awareness he generates flows back to an asset he owns rather than to somebody else’s balance sheet. He explained the logic simply: he agreed to put his name on the business because it would bring awareness and credibility. “My signature is on it and I’m behind it,” Brady said.
His other equity bet shows the math. Brady folded his TB12 and Brady Brand businesses into Mike Repole’s NOBULL in 2024 and became a major shareholder instead of a paid spokesperson. In January 2026, NOBULL raised $50 million at a $1 billion valuation and added Livvy Dunne as a partner. No endorsement deal in his portfolio created a billion-dollar asset.
This is the same trade a growing number of athletes are making. We’ve written about athlete investing collectives pushing for seats on startup cap tables, about Charles Leclerc’s six real ventures, and about why Cole Palmer launched an ice brand rather than signing a beverage deal. The pattern repeats because the incentives are obvious once you’ve seen a licensing check expire.
The counterexample is instructive. Prime Hydration’s collapse showed what happens when the celebrity attachment is the entire business rather than a distribution advantage layered on top of one. CardVault had three profitable stores, a Fanatics relationship, and a working supply chain before Brady arrived. He accelerated something that already worked.
Is CardVault by Tom Brady a good investment?
CardVault is privately held, so retail investors can’t buy in, but the company’s August 2026 investor round tells you how sophisticated money is pricing it. On August 13, 2026, CardVault announced its first strategic investor group, and the roster reads like a sports-business who’s who: JAY-Z, Yankees captain Aaron Judge, Oilers captain Connor McDavid, UFC CEO Dana White, RedBird Capital founder Gerry Cardinale, Silver Lake co-CEOs Egon Durban and Greg Mondre, Addition founder Lee Fixel, Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, Celtics co-owner Wyc Grousbeck, Fenway Sports Group principal owner John Henry, and The Kraft Group.
That group is doing two things at once. Cardinale, Durban, Fixel, and Mondre are institutional capital that underwrites businesses for a living, which is a real signal about the unit economics. Judge, McDavid, JAY-Z, and White are distribution: each one brings an audience and a reason for that audience to walk into a store.
The stated use of funds is unglamorous and therefore believable. The company said the capital goes toward additional stores, new distribution channels, hiring, technology, and supply-chain infrastructure. Nobody raises money for supply-chain infrastructure as a vanity exercise.
The risk is the same risk that has always defined this hobby. Trading cards boomed in the late 1980s, drowned in overproduction by the mid-1990s, and spent two decades as a niche. The current $50 billion market was built substantially during a pandemic when people had time and stimulus money. A physical retail chain with 100 locations is a fixed-cost bet that the current cycle holds. Brady has answered that question with his own money. He’s building for a hobby he believes is permanent, and he took an ownership position rather than a licensing signature to prove it.
What is Tom Brady’s net worth in 2026?
Published estimates of Tom Brady’s net worth in 2026 range from about $300 million to $460 million, and none of them are audited. The figures come from aggregator sites that model publicly known contracts and deals, so treat any single number as a guess with a decimal point attached. The verifiable pieces are more useful than the total.
Brady earned more than $330 million in salary across his 23-year NFL career. In 2022 he signed a 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox to serve as its lead NFL game analyst, or $37.5 million a year, the largest contract in the history of sports broadcasting. NFL owners unanimously approved his minority stake in the Las Vegas Raiders in October 2024, and he holds stakes in the Las Vegas Aces and Birmingham City FC as well.
Then there’s the equity layer that the net-worth sites handle worst. A 50% position in a private retail chain growing revenue 400% year over year has no public mark. Neither did his NOBULL position until the January 2026 round priced the company at $1 billion. Illiquid private equity is exactly the part of a balance sheet that estimate sites guess at, which is why the range spans $160 million.
The honest answer: nobody outside Brady’s family office knows. We’ve run into the same problem valuing creator businesses, from IShowSpeed’s actual earnings math to Kai Cenat’s Streamer University model. Public numbers capture contracts. They miss cap tables.
The four ways a famous name attaches to a business
Brady has personally used all four structures below, which makes his portfolio a useful comparison set. The differences come down to who owns the upside and who carries the operating risk.
| Structure | Brady example | What the name earns | Main risk | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Endorsement or licensing | Pizza Hut, Dunkin’, Delta, Duracell | A fee for a fixed term | Nothing accrues; the deal ends and ownership is zero | Established brands buying reach they can measure |
| Equity plus operating role | CardVault, 50% stake | Enterprise value, plus control over how the name is used | Time and reputation are tied to execution the owner doesn’t fully control | Businesses that already work and need distribution to scale |
| Merge-in equity | TB12 and Brady Brand into NOBULL | Shares in a larger platform instead of a standalone brand | Loss of control; the original brand can be wound down | Subscale brands that can’t fund their own distribution |
| Passive minority stake | Las Vegas Raiders, Birmingham City FC | Asset appreciation with no operating obligation | Illiquid, and governance sits with the majority owner | Capital preservation in assets with scarcity value |
What founders can copy from the CardVault playbook
The transferable lesson isn’t “get a famous cofounder.” It’s that CardVault’s team refused the small version of the deal, and founders on the receiving end of celebrity interest should notice which side pushed for scope.
Rubin pitched one store. Brady countered with all of them. Costa, who had built a profitable three-store chain with a real Fanatics relationship and a working break business, said yes to the bigger structure rather than protecting his ownership percentage. He gave up half the company and got a partner who talks to him daily and personally fixes supply allocation. Costa admitted he’d been skeptical about how involved Brady would actually be, and that Brady’s involvement went well past what he expected.
Four things founders can act on from this:
- Sell equity to people who solve a specific bottleneck. Brady’s value to CardVault is Pokémon allocation, store-opening traffic, and a Fanatics relationship, not vibes. Before you give up points, name the bottleneck the investor closes.
- Prove the unit before you scale it. CardVault had three profitable stores and four revenue lines before it raised or expanded. Costa’s “every store is profitable to date” claim is the whole reason the 100-store plan is credible instead of delusional.
- Put the partner’s incentive inside the asset. A spokesperson stops promoting when the check clears. A 50% owner works the phones on a Tuesday because it’s his company. If you can’t afford the fee, the equity version is often the better deal for both sides anyway.
- Locate where demand already stands. CardVault targets stadiums, ballparks, and destination malls like the American Dream Mall in New Jersey rather than cheap strip-mall rent. The economics of physical retail run on traffic you don’t have to buy, a principle that also drives the better low-cost franchise models in 2026.
There’s a version of this available to founders without a Hall of Fame quarterback in their contacts. The mechanic is equity in exchange for a specific unfair advantage, and it’s the same logic behind creator platforms that take a percentage instead of a flat fee. Alignment beats a retainer.
Brady put it in football terms, which is unsurprising. “There’s a great saying we had in New England, ‘do your job’,” he told Front Office Sports, describing Costa’s team as the operators and himself as the one who brings awareness and enhances the collection. He isn’t running the retail business. He’s the reason 17 stores opened in 18 months instead of three.
