36Kr Exclusive | PLAYFULLY Secures Investment From Qingshan Capital, Creating a "Chinese Sports Star Trading Card" for the World
By Ren Cairu
36Kr has learned that PLAYFULLY, an emerging collectible card company (hereafter referred to as "PLAYFULLY"), has recently completed a new round of financing, led by Qingshan Capital, with continued follow-on investment from Adam Zhu, an angel round old shareholder, and Linglu Capital acting as the long-term financial advisor. The funds from this round will be mainly used for the acquisition and expansion of the world's top sports IP, product R&D and process innovation, as well as the construction of a global omni-channel system.
Founded in the second half of 2024, PLAYFULLY's core team has been deeply engaged in cultural and sports IP operation, trend derivative development and the card industry for many years. Cao Lei, the founder of the company, has 20 years of experience in sports industry operation and investment. He worked at IMG, the world's largest sports management company, for many years, and was also responsible for cultural and sports investment and industrial operation at institutions including Suning Investment, Yao Capital, Fosun Group and IDG.
In August 2024, PLAYFULLY entered the market with derivatives of Honor of Kings Professional League (KPL), the top e-sports IP. The revenue exceeded 1 million RMB in the first month after the product was launched, and it achieved 10 million-level revenue and profitability in the first year. On this basis, the team focused its core direction on the track where it has resource barriers and professional accumulation — top sports IP and sports trading cards.
In March 2025, PLAYFULLY secured a five-year exclusive Asian licensing partnership with the Argentina national football team, and reached an official autograph cooperation on trading cards with football superstar Lionel Messi. Later in July 2026, it locked in the exclusive license of the Belgium national football team, and successively launched a series of collectible cards such as the Argentina National Team HALO and RADIANCE series during the World Cup through its trading card brand "HEROCK", as well as the popular mass-oriented 10-yuan pack product RUNE.
Recently, the Argentina series of cards under PLAYFULLY have officially been included in the grading systems of CGC and PSA, the world's authoritative card grading agencies. At the same time, PLAYFULLY has continued to set high transaction records on domestic trading platforms, among which the 1-of-1 autographed Messi card of the RADIANCE series was traded at 120,000 RMB in September. All these marks that PLAYFULLY, as a new local sports trading card publisher, has been recognized by the international mainstream collectible card evaluation standards.
Messi's autograph photo and graded HEROCK cards (Source: PLAYFULLY)
At present, China's card and trend toy track is going through a reshuffling period from barbaric growth to professional and refined operation. On the one hand, "goods" and entertainment cards derived from animation, film, television and ACG content are facing challenges such as short life cycle, rapid rotation of hot spots and increasing traffic anxiety; on the other hand, the traditional sports trading card market has long been monopolized by overseas giants, and the secondary market is excessively financialized with high thresholds, which has blocked the vast majority of mass consumers. PLAYFULLY tries to take "product first" as the fulcrum, and rely on China's mature supply chain and creative design capabilities to reshape a sports derivative ecosystem that integrates collection value and mass cultural attributes.
01 We make sports trading cards recognized by the industry, and also bring them to the general public
In the derivative industry, the choice of IP determines the underlying life cycle of the business model. Compared with TV dramas and periodic hit animations whose life cycles are often only a few months to one or two years, sports IP has better stability and self-driven growth potential. Regular large and small events held every year, the emergence of new stars and the legendary moments of veteran players will continuously inject new content and emotions into sports IP.
At the same time, the access threshold for sports IP is also higher, especially in the competition for top international IP, where pure capital advantages have long been ineffective. In the bidding for the exclusive Asian license of the Argentina national football team, there were competitors who offered several times or even dozens of times of premium, but the Argentine Football Association finally chose to cooperate with PLAYFULLY.
Cao Lei attributed this breakthrough to the combination of deep industrial trust and professional IP incubation capabilities, "In the sports industry, international copyright holders are very picky. They not only value the cooperation history and performance certainty, but also care about whether you understand sports, whether you can make good products, and whether you have the comprehensive ability to cultivate IP and fan ecology in the long run."
"Product first" is one of the creeds of PLAYFULLY. Aiming at the industrial design of sports trading cards that has long been dominated by the European and American systems, PLAYFULLY, while benchmarking against international mainstream processes such as Refraction, scarce Parallel cards, official autograph and relic patch cards, innovatively integrates local Chinese culture into international sports collectibles.
For example, the PLAYFULLY team has co-branded with cultural IP such as Dunhuang and the Palace Museum, integrating Chinese own culture and aesthetics into the design. The product design and quality have also been recognized by IP holders and many star players. Even many players took the initiative to ask to keep some of PLAYFULLY's cards for collection after signing. Cao Lei said with a laugh that every time he went to players for autographs, the most worrying thing was that the players would take the cards away for collection after signing. "Because some cards are 1-of-1, there is only one copy in the world, and if it is taken away, the entire product configuration will be affected."
For a long time, the high pricing of overseas giants has turned sports trading cards into a premium game for a small number of people to a certain extent, but PLAYFULLY hopes to break this "small circle". "A healthy and vibrant market should present a 'pyramid' structure — the top of the pyramid is the top collection and investment circulation for high-net-worth collectors, and the huge base of the pyramid is the cultural identity and daily consumption of mass enthusiasts, teenagers and ordinary families."
Products of the 10-yuan RUNE series (Source: PLAYFULLY)
To this end, PLAYFULLY has built a layered product matrix that takes into account both professionalism and inclusiveness. At the middle end of the pyramid, it launched mid-range collectible cards such as the HALO series with an official retail price of 699 RMB per box (containing 6 packs and 30 cards in total), with an average price of about 20 RMB per card, using high-quality refraction technology and affordable pricing to compete with similar overseas products that cost thousands or even tens of thousands of RMB; At the base of the pyramid, PLAYFULLY launched the "Argentina National Team Official Collectible 10-Yuan Pack" in mid-July 2026, lowering the price threshold to a level accessible to the public and teenagers, and buyers also have a chance to get rare special cards and autographs. After the World Cup, PLAYFULLY also launched the high-end RADIANCE series with a retail price of 17,500 RMB, which was sold out in a short time and received good market feedback.
In terms of channels, high-unit-price collectible cards mainly rely on online live streaming rooms for card unboxing, group-buying communities and offline professional card stores to accumulate high-viscosity core users; while the 10-yuan packs are fully distributed to trend toy collection stores, supermarkets, convenience stores and roadside stores in sinking markets. This layout that takes into account both professional collectors and general sports enthusiasts has also become the foothold for PLAYFULLY to promote sports trading cards from "speculation by a small group of people" to "mass cultural companionship".
02 Integrate Chinese creativity into the global sports story
From the perspective of the global industry, sports trading cards and sports derivatives are a super business that has been repeatedly verified. The latest valuation of Fanatics, the North American sports consumer giant, has reached tens of billions of dollars, and Panini, the established card giant, also has an annual revenue of several billion dollars.
The mature global market has proved that sports cards are not just paper collectibles, but a long-term consumption form that connects sports IP, fan culture, collection, trading and communities. Cao Lei told 36Kr that in the United States, sports trading card consumers account for nearly 10% of the total population, forming a nearly 100-year-old intergenerational inheritance culture; while in China, the audience penetration rate of sports trading cards is less than 0.1%, and the 100-fold increment space behind it is extremely broad.
From the perspective of domestic trend toy cards, China is forming its own card culture. In recent years, IP such as animation, games and film and television have continued to promote the popularization of card consumption, and consumers' awareness of "card drawing, collection, exchange, grading and trading" has continued to mature, especially young consumers have gradually become important participants in the card market. According to the data from the annual report of trading cards on Xianyu, the transaction volume of trading cards on the platform increased by 84% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2025, and the transaction volume of sports trading cards increased by 104% year-on-year. Sports trading cards are becoming an important growth category in China's card market.
This also means that China's sports trading cards do not need to cultivate the market from scratch, but enter a new sports IP growth stage on the basis of the already formed card consumption culture. At the same time, young people and teenagers are becoming important new groups for the future sports collection culture.
Overview of the overseas sports trading card industry chain and some unicorn companies (Source: PLAYFULLY)
Further from the perspective of derivatives, Cao Lei found that for a long time, there has been a significant "supply-side gap" in the domestic sports derivatives market: product forms have remained on the traditional "three old items" of jerseys, scarves, hats and water cups for decades, with serious homogeneous design, lack of creativity and emotional interaction. In contrast, global sports events are facing the challenges of aging audiences and fragmented attention, and copyright holders are also very eager to attract the participation of female, teenager and young family customer groups.
PLAYFULLY does not limit itself to the narrow definition of a "card company", but hopes to fully empower the sports derivative track with the design creativity, innovation capabilities and manufacturing advantages that Chinese companies have accumulated in the trend toy field. In recent years, one of the consensuses of global sports IP is to attract more women, families, especially teenagers to pay attention to and consume sports. The company is gradually exploring a variety of trend categories beyond card products around sports IP, transforming the traditionally hardcore, male-dominated sports IP into high-value, fun pan-entertainment lifestyle consumer goods, creating more product categories for sports IP and improving playability and repurchase rate.
In addition to the expansion of categories and audiences, China's mature innovation and production capabilities have also helped PLAYFULLY stand out in overseas markets — Although PLAYFULLY has not been established for a long time, its Argentina series of cards have been actively purchased through overseas distributor networks, and sold to core Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, as well as Hong Kong, China and Macau, China. Even some exhibition-limited PR cards are sought after by overseas collectors at a premium in the secondary market. On eBay, the trading volume of PLAYFULLY's cards is also gradually rising.
Overseas markets have mature sports consumption awareness and stronger purchasing power, while China's mature cultural consumer goods supply chain can not only achieve extreme cost performance and fast delivery, but also have global competitiveness in process precision and gameplay design.
Talking about the future, Cao Lei told 36Kr that PLAYFULLY will continue to take sports IP as the anchor. On the one hand, it will deepen the signing and layout of international top event resources, and gradually form a multi-IP matrix; on the other hand, it will continue to deepen around the existing IP, gradually explore a variety of derivatives beyond sports trading cards, and improve the commercial value and user coverage of a single IP.
PLAYFULLY e-sports products and KPL derivative product images (Source: PLAYFULLY)
In terms of market expansion, PLAYFULLY will take the Chinese market as the basis, and gradually expand to Southeast Asia and other overseas markets. Through localized product design, channels and content operation, it will replicate its proven product capabilities to more markets, forming a development path of "multi-IP, multi-product, multi-market". On the operational side, the company will further connect fan-exclusive rights such as online communities, ticket redemption, and offline player meetups, so that the product is not just a collectible, but also an entry point connecting IP and fans.
Eventually, PLAYFULLY hopes to be based in Asia and face the whole world, take sports IP as the core entry point, deepen IP value through continuous product innovation, and gradually replicate its mature product capabilities to more IP and markets.
Investor's View:
Angel Investor Adam Zhu: The reason why I continue to be optimistic about the opportunities of domestic cards is that the Chinese market itself is large enough, it has the world's leading supply chain and increasingly strong product innovation capabilities, and overseas markets are also providing more opportunities for Chinese brands. What really attracts me about PLAYFULLY is that this company and this team can combine IP, products and supply chain very well, and based on the Chinese market, further expand overseas. This direction has huge room for imagination.