Craftsmen, not a fund
We fix up marketplaces. We have collected stamps since the 1990s, sold them at auction since 1999, and written the software for both ever since.
We were collectors before we were engineers, and we have never really put the albums down. Classic European issues and the colonial ones that followed, picture postcards, postal history, Liebig cards. Collecting taught us patience and taught us how sellers and buyers actually behave, long before we wrote software for them.
In 1999 we became partners in a European stamp auction house. Room sales, fairs, mail auctions: We learned what a mis-described lot costs in trust, why a catalogue has to be honest, and how much of an auction business is simply looking after people.
In 2018 we built ProCollecta, our own online auction platform for collectables, with escrow payments and terms of sale in four languages. Around the same time we built the websites for a national philatelic federation and, later, the auction system for its joint body with the postal service and the dealers’ chamber, and the member platform for the Cover Collectors Circuit Club.
Today we operate the infrastructure behind a network of more than 45 peer-to-peer marketplace sites: payments and payouts, fraud defence, moderation tooling, search, performance. It is the same job as running a stamp auction, at a scale where the mistakes cost more and the tooling has to be right.
Which brings us to the sites we want to take over. The dated collector marketplaces built by one person twenty years ago are some of the best communities on the internet, and most of them are one server failure away from disappearing. We would like to be the people who keep them running. Not as an investment. As a craft.
What we collect
Classic philately in depth, and the things around it.
Classic Europe and the colonial issues that followed: occupation issues, booklets, railway and telegraph stamps, precancels, luxe sheets, varieties and unadopted designs. Congo from the Free State through Katanga and Zaïre. Picture postcards by region, steam trams, world fairs.
Around that, postal history from the First World War, Liebig trade cards in every language edition, and philatelic literature, which we also catalogue and sell. We price against COB, Michel, Yvert and Stanley Gibbons, and we say which one.
Where we come from
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1990s
Collecting, then programming
Stamps first, classic Europe and the colonies, then the software to keep track of them. The two habits have been feeding each other ever since.
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1999
Into the auction trade
Partners in a European stamp auction house: room auctions, fairs and mail sales. That is where we learned what sellers worry about and what makes buyers trust a catalogue.
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2018
ProCollecta
Built and launched our own online auction platform for collectables, with escrow payments and terms of sale in four languages. Still the name we trade under.
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2018–2022
Platforms for the philatelic institutions
Websites and an auction system for a national philatelic federation, its provincial bodies and the joint body of the federation, the postal service and the dealers’ chamber.
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2019–2025
Cover Collectors Circuit Club
Member platform for one of the oldest philatelic exchange clubs in the world, founded 1947: circuit rotation, wishlists, the club’s own grading scale. Four generations of the software so far.
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2021
Charity auction for the Royal Philatelic Society London
More than 1,700 lots of duplicate literature photographed, described and sold, 6% of proceeds to the Society.
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Today
Running marketplaces at scale
Operating the infrastructure behind a network of more than 45 peer-to-peer marketplace sites: payments, fraud defence, moderation tooling, performance. And looking for the next niche marketplace that deserves a second life.