Leore Avidar

Overview

Leore Avidar is an entrepreneur who founded the alternative-asset marketplace Alt and co-founded the programmable direct-mail company Lob. He started Alt after returning to sports-card collecting and finding that the hobby lacked pricing transparency, trustworthy infrastructure and reasonable fees, and he had built Lob nearly a decade earlier to let businesses send physical mail through software instead of printers (Crunchbase News; MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference).

Before either company, Avidar was an early employee at Amazon Web Services and a derivatives trader on Wall Street (MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference). That combination — pricing illiquid assets on a trading floor, then building developer infrastructure at AWS — runs through both of his companies: Lob applied software interfaces to the post office, and Alt applied them to collectibles.

Lob: making mail programmable

Avidar founded Lob with Harry Zhang to “allow people to send mail programmatically” (TechCrunch). The MIT Sloan conference bio dates the start to 2013 and describes Lob as a platform that lets users send direct mail programmatically (MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference). Over time the company concentrated on enterprise clients: by February 2021 its more than 8,500 customers included Twitter, Expedia and Booking.com, and its platform had been used to deliver mail to one in two households in the United States (TechCrunch).

Avidar explained the pitch in two parts: some mail must still be sent on paper for regulatory or compliance reasons, and marketing mail was being rediscovered because social and search advertising had grown expensive while email was easy to unsubscribe from (TechCrunch). Lob said it could cut a direct-mail campaign’s execution time by 95%, from 90 days to less than a day, by routing printing and delivery through a national partner network (TechCrunch). The February 2021 Series C, a $50 million round led by Y Combinator Continuity, brought Lob’s total raised to $80 million and was earmarked for expanding that Print Delivery Network and growing headcount beyond 260 employees (TechCrunch).

Alt: from a card collection to a marketplace

Alt grew out of Avidar’s own collecting. About four years before launch he went looking for a rare Kobe Bryant card, the Skybox 1996 E-X200, and as he moved from collector to investor he ran into the hobby’s gaps: opaque prices, fraud risk and high fees (Crunchbase News). The scale of his collecting was public before Alt existed: in 2020 he paid $1.8 million at Goldin Auctions for a 2003-04 Upper Deck LeBron James rookie card, months before Alt’s debut (Front Office Sports).

Alt officially launched in March 2021 after raising $31 million across a seed round led by First Round Capital and a Series A led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six (Crunchbase News). The investor list for those rounds included John and Patrick Collison and Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures, alongside SV Angel, BoxGroup and Chapter One (Crunchbase News). At launch Alt sold only cards it already held that had been professionally graded by a third party such as PSA, charged a 1.5% transaction fee against auction houses’ 12.5% to 25%, and had about 30 employees split between San Francisco and New York (Crunchbase News).

Eight months later Alt raised a $75 million Series B at a valuation the company put at over $325 million, led by Spearhead and again backed by Seven Seven Six (TechCrunch). By then the company had about 60 employees, had hired Nicole Colombo, formerly eBay’s general manager of collectibles and trading cards, as its first president, and was preparing mobile apps (TechCrunch). Cards bought on Alt stayed in its light-controlled, temperature-controlled, fire-protected “Vault” by default, and Avidar said 99% of cards remained there after purchase because buyers treated them as investments rather than display pieces (TechCrunch). His stated goal beyond cards was to expand into “things from sneakers, to watches, to NFTs,” with sports cards as the proof point (TechCrunch). By August 2022 the company was reported to be raising a further $40 million, with its total raised put at $305 million according to CrunchBase (Front Office Sports).

Company	Started	What it does	Funding by early 2021
Lob	2013, with Harry Zhang	APIs that let businesses send direct mail programmatically	$80 million total after a $50 million Series C
Alt	2020, public launch March 2021	Exchange for graded, vault-stored sports cards and other alternative assets	$31 million at launch; $75 million Series B by November 2021

What this profile does not claim

• Avidar’s role at Lob after 2021 is not stated: the sources read describe him as Lob’s co-founder and CEO up to the February 2021 Series C, and later leadership was not verified.
• The year of his Forbes 30 Under 30 honour is not given, because the conference bio that records the honour does not state it.
• Alt’s funding total after August 2022 is not claimed: the $305 million figure is a CrunchBase aggregator total reported by Front Office Sports, not an editorially verified round-by-round sum.
• No Wall Street employer is named for Avidar’s trading career, since the sources read describe the role but not the firm.