Professional Sports Authenticator’s parent company, Collectors, is investing $200 million into the authentication and grading giant to expand operations over the next 18 months, the company announced Thursday. PSA will use the new funding to grow the company’s physical footprint, develop and deploy new technology and hire for 1,000 open and planned positions through 2026. The industry leader in trading card authentication by submission volume, PSA graded over 19 million cards in 2025 — more than 14 million ahead of its closest competitor and up from two million in 2020.

“To maintain the PSA standard at this scale, we have to grow holistically,” Collectors president Ryan Hoge told The Athletic of the investment. “This expansion impacts the entire life cycle of a collectible—from a larger, more efficient receiving and logistics area to an expanded grading floor that accommodates our growing team. We are also significantly increasing our PSA Vault footprint to ensure we provide the most secure environment for the high-value collections entrusted to us.”

Hoge also explained how new technology will be deployed: “While our process remains human-led, we view technology as a powerful tool to assist, not replace, our experts. We are investing heavily in the tools our graders use every day, specifically enhancing our research and database resources. By integrating proprietary AI and machine learning into our workflows, we can quickly flag anomalies, surface patterns, and provide our experts with better data, helping us scale without ever compromising on precision.”

Collectors previously raised $100 million in 2021 at a $4.3 billion valuation with financing from investors D1 Capital Partners, Cohen Private Ventures and The Chernin Group. Collectors and PSA have rapidly expanded since. PSA’s graded card output has increased from more than 11 million cards in 2022, according to grading tracker GemRate, to 13.5 million in 2023 and 15.3 million in 2024 before eclipsing 19 million last year to more than double the output of the next three major authenticators combined. PSA has already graded more than eight million cards in 2026, with output from January through April up 39 percent year-over-year.

“We do not view the current demand as a temporary surge,” Hoge said. “The global collecting community has experienced a historic and sustained boom, and the market has fundamentally matured. … Every dollar of this $200 million is backed by exhaustive data modeling to ensure we are building a sustainable infrastructure that protects the health of the hobby for the next decade, not just the next month.”

According to Collectors, submission volume, which data shows has been heavily driven by increased interest in Pokémon, trading card games (TCG) and non-sports cards, is outpacing the company’s previous expansions. In addition to its Southern California headquarters, PSA has opened additional facilities in Florida, New Jersey, Texas and Tokyo since 2021.

“We are hiring aggressively across the operational pipeline to reach our 1,000-position growth goal,” Hoge said. “Because every card undergoes a rigorous, multistep journey, we are scaling teams across identification, research, grading, quality assurance and assembly to ensure bottlenecks are eliminated at every stage of the process.

“A portion of this investment is dedicated to ‘Graders University,’ our industry-leading training program. Every new PSA grader must complete this rigorous curriculum and execute thousands of supervised evaluations before grading independently. Part of our $200 million commitment is integrating new technology directly into that training process and expanding education on emerging counterfeit techniques, ensuring our experts have the best possible education before they ever touch a customer’s card.”

PSA also announced changes to service level turnaround times Thursday, with the company shifting from an estimated number of business days to a wider completion range. New submissions for PSA’s two most popular service tiers, Value Bulk ($24.99 per card) and Value ($32.99), will have estimated completion ranges of 140 to 160 days and 100 to 120 days, beginning May 14. Prior to Thursday’s changes, the estimated turnaround time for Value Bulk was 95 days and 75 days for Value. PSA most recently increased prices and estimated turnaround times for popular service levels in February to meet demand.

PSA’s estimated completion ranges as of May 14 (business days):

• Value Bulk: 140–160 days
• Value: 100–120 days
• Value Plus: 60–80 days
• Value Max: 40–50 days
• Regular: 30–40 days
• Express: 20–30 days
• Super Express: 7–10 days
• Walkthrough and higher: 5–7 days

Due to high demand, PSA is also increasing the price of its Super Express service level from $299 per card to $349 per card.

It’s unclear how much additional investment will be made in grading companies SGC or Beckett, which are both under the Collectors umbrella as well. Collectors acquired SGC in February 2024 and Beckett’s authentication, grading and media businesses in December 2025. Hoge told The Athletic in January that the trio of graders will be viewed as competitors and have their own independent standards and operations teams.

Beckett announced its first significant changes since being acquired by Collectors earlier this week, including a label refresh and a new logo. The updated label features a larger final grade on the front and enhanced security features, including holographic elements, microprinting and UV-reactive details. Beckett retired the “B-Star” logo for an updated crest, which it believes is a modern update to past marks.

Beckett general manager Colin Hudson told The Athletic on Tuesday that the company has continued to operate independently from PSA since being acquired by Collectors but still stands to benefit from some additional investment.

“I think we have this comfortable distance in that we feel autonomous to operate as Beckett and take control of our own destiny, but at the same time leverage the resources of parent Collectors,” Hudson said. “So this year, we’re hiring 90-plus people. We are significantly expanding our footprint and evolving our operations here in Plano.

“We’re getting a lot of tech investment. We’re just able to do a lot with the help of Collectors that I don’t think we would have otherwise had. To me, it’s kind of the best of both worlds where we’re able to remain autonomous.”

According to Hudson, Beckett has increased its output from about 4,000 cards per day to about 7,000 since being acquired by Collectors. The goal is to eventually raise that number to 15,000 by the end of 2027. Additional long-term updates from Beckett could include a new acrylic holder, which Hudson says would make each case sturdier and less prone to chipping or cracking than the current plastic. The design of the slab wouldn’t change, and the new material is dependent on financial viability.

Collectors’ biggest impact on Beckett is expected to arrive later this year and into 2027 through technology improvements. Beckett plans to introduce a vaulting feature similar to PSA’s, which allows customers to ship some cards home, store others in a secured vault or even sell items through PSA’s official storefront on eBay. Beckett plans to add pre- and post-grading imaging for all cards, and that process may start with the company purchasing the same equipment used by PSA for its library, which now features more than 270 million scans.

“So the most tangible outcomes are going to be later this year, possibly earlier in 2027, and those are the things where there is just a lot more tech investment,” Hudson said. “Think about the underlying infrastructure of a card going end-to-end, from submission on the website to being received, going through each stage of the grading process. And that’s kind of the boring, very unsexy software that’s the backbone of the entire grading operation for PSA and Beckett, PCGS, SGC.”

There’s been little update from SGC, which has seen its grading output rapidly decline since being acquired by Collectors in 2024. SGC’s output jumped 46 percent from 2023 to 2024, but declined 24 percent year-over-year in 2025. SGC graded roughly 50,000 cards in April, which is down 70 percent year-over-year.

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