Objective and Formation
Elder Tomes Limited is primarily a technology startup that seeks to solve problems in the collectible resale market. It began with an idea by the founder of Elder Tomes, Levi Shafter, to use AI for easy identification, digital organization, and resale of his unwanted Magic: the Gathering cards. Levi has a passion for trading card games, archaeology/anthropology, technology, and history. It is his hope to use recent technological advances to view the story of mankind through an entirely new lens, and it all starts with Elder Tomes and its goal to automate the most time-consuming aspects of exchanging collectibles, curiosities, oddities, and artifacts.
The Plan
- To finish developing publicly available automation software which identifies, grades, organizes, and sells MTG, Pokemon, and YuGiOh! trading cards with minimal yet highly customizable user interaction. We also hope to support a much greater variety of games and card types, as well as other forms of collectibles in the future.
- To provide consignment services for collectibles and historical artifacts of virtually any sort at a far more generous rate than what is currently offered with the very few competitors we have. This is possible because of our focus on automation which gives us a highly scaleable, sustainable, and lightening fast infrastructure.
- To turn the collectible grading industry on its head with AI capable of identifying the condition of various items using cutting-edge reverse image regression training algorithms. If you have ever gotten a valuable item graded, you know how expensive and time-consuming this process is with conventional services. We hope to continue development on our grading software until it renders conventional grading irrelevant to spare collectors and sellers alike the severe inefficiencies of traditional grading.
- To use excess proceeds to form a non-profit research institution to study the origins of man and the cultures lost to father time. Technology has always been the primary force that fuels science and progress. The applications of deep learning and AI are extremely promising in the anthropological, archaeological, and historical sciences. Civilization often focuses so much on the future that it fails to recognize the knowledge that can be gained by looking to the past. By using the technology of the future, Elder Tomes hopes to fund research that could help us dig up more wisdom from our ancestors than we ever have before.