Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic, or spread out all over your coworker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are over 8,000 different Pops, and that number never seems to stop growing.
Like most collectible things, some Pops are worth more than others — whether they’re obscure characters that didn’t get a big run, limited edition color variations, or were only sold for a day or two at a convention, the rarest Pops can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. And, like anything where people are dropping piles of cash, there are folks trying to sell fakes. Whatnot, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 class, wants to tackle the issue of fakes in collectibles by adapting a model proven by services like GOAT and StockX: authenticated resale. As with the aforementioned, Whatnot works as the obsessively-informed middle man between buyer and seller. Buyer makes an offer, seller sends their figurine to Whatnot, Whatnot uses its growing knowledge of what’s real (and how to flag what’s not) to make sure it’s legit. If everything looks good, Whatnot forwards the Funko Pop onto the buyer and takes their cut (about 9%, plus a few bucks for shipping.) “We started out buying and reselling sneakers, actually,” Whatnot co-founder Grant Lafontaine tells me. “Then we started getting into buying/reselling Funko Pops. As we started to do this, we noticed it was much more difficult, and much more unsafe, to buy and sell Funko Pops than it was to buy and sell sneakers.” Services like GOAT and StockX had “drastically simplified” the process for sneaker fans, Lafontaine says, helping to weed out counterfeits for buyers while limiting potential scams that could hurt sellers.![](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/whatnot.png?resize=680%2C394&ssl=1)