The Portland area company is one of 10 startups selected for the seventh cohort of the Roux Institute's Founder Residency, from across the US and the world.

PORTLAND, ME, UNITED STATES, August 27, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- CardSight AI, Inc. has been selected for the Founder Residency at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, one of 10 startups in the program's seventh cohort, coming from around the US and the world.

CardSight AI supplies the foundations that every trading card app, marketplace, and grading service would otherwise have to build alone: card identification, a structured catalog, and market data, all delivered through one REST API and MCP endpoints for AI agents.

The Founder Residency is the Roux Institute's longest-running entrepreneurship program, having run six cohorts to date. It charges no fee and takes no equity. As part of its mission to create a diverse and equitable start-up ecosystem in Maine, the residency focuses on making the startup ecosystem accessible to all. Every participating company has at least one founder living and working in Portland for at least three months.

CardSight AI's residency runs from September through December 2026, followed by free membership in the Roux Incubator through August 2027.

Built in Maine

CardSight AI was founded in Kennebunk, about twenty miles south of Portland, and has built the company in southern Maine from day one. That was never a compromise. Maine has assembled a genuine support system for technology founders, and CardSight AI has drawn on it at every stage, including early research and development funding from the Maine Technology Institute.

Maine ranks thirteenth nationally as a place to start a business, according to WalletHub, and Portland sits on the Atlantic coast ninety minutes north of Boston, with an international airport serving more than fifteen direct destinations. Founders who build here tend to stay, and not out of sentiment. The network compounds quickly and the people in it are reachable.

Through the residency, CardSight AI will work alongside Northeastern University researchers and graduate students on their downtown Portland campus, with matched mentors, legal counsel, design and business support, and Northeastern University's global network of investors and corporate partners.

"Maine has been a great place to build a technology company," said Eric Nusbaum, Co-Founder and CEO of CardSight AI. "We serve a global hobby from the Portland area, and programs like the Founder Residency are why that works."

Building in the age of AI

AI has collapsed the distance between an idea and a working product. A developer with a clear concept can stand up a functioning app in a weekend, and the trading card space has no shortage of them.

What AI has not changed is the cost of the foundations underneath. Identifying a card correctly, maintaining an accurate catalog across every set and parallel ever printed, and sourcing reliable market data still take time and serious capital. Those are the same three problems for every builder, and solving them only produces the baseline features every user already expects an app to have.

CardSight AI takes that work off the table. When identification, catalog, and market data arrive through an API, a team's time goes into the part only that team can build: the interface, the community, the workflow, the reason someone picks their product over another.

What CardSight AI is building

CardSight AI turns foundations that take a card company years and considerable capital to build into something a team can integrate in an afternoon.

Identification comes first, because it is the hardest part. Most tools on the market still ask a person to line up one card at a time inside a box on the screen, the way a mobile banking app asks you to line up a check before it will accept the deposit. CardSight AI accepts an ordinary photo, taken at an angle, with several cards in the frame, and returns results in under 300 milliseconds per image at 99.5% accuracy. Coverage spans major United States sports, Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, and One Piece, with printed language detection across eight languages. New sets are supported in days rather than months. CardSight AI shipped support for Pokémon Pitch Black and 2026 Topps Flagship Football days after release.

Underneath that sits the CardSight AI Catalog, a trading card database of more than 13 million cards organized by segment, manufacturer, release, set, card, and parallel. A canonical trading card database does not exist publicly. Publishers do not release one and no single source has assembled it, which is why CardSight AI treats the catalog as a product in its own right.

The third layer is market data, published as transparent bid and ask information tied back to specific sales. CardSight AI does not calculate a comp or publish a single price for a card. It gives customers clarity into the underlying market so they can apply their own analysis. Data, not opinions.

All three reach developers through one REST API, with SDKs for Node.js, Python, Swift, Java, and .NET, plus MCP endpoints for AI agents and LLM integrations, and a free tier that requires no credit card. A team adding Pokemon identification to an app, querying a trading card database, or wiring up a sports card API can do all of it through a single integration.

What comes next

CardSight AI enters the residency with a growing base of paying subscribers already building on its API, from independent developers to enterprise marketplaces. The company plans to use the program to expand category coverage, deepen its market data, and grow the engineering team in Maine.

About CardSight AI

CardSight AI, Inc. is a trading card identification and data infrastructure company based in the Portland, Maine area. Its platform combines fast, accurate card identification, the CardSight AI Catalog trading card database of more than 13 million cards, and transparent market data, delivered through a single developer sports card API with SDKs and MCP endpoints for AI agents and LLM integrations. CardSight AI is a member of the NVIDIA Inception program. Learn more at https://cardsight.ai.

Eric Nusbaum
CardSight AI, Inc.
+1 207-699-4565
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