A versatile software engineer and technology manager, Vartul Agrawal is head of engineering for Arena Club, a pioneering collectibles platform based in Los Angeles. Helping Arena Club fulfill its goal to bridge the physical and digital worlds, the Indian native has been integral in developing the online marketplace and grading platform using secure blockchain storage and a proprietary AI authentication and grading system that is much faster, more accurate and less expensive, letting members digitally view each other’s collections, and to buy, sell and trade with greater ease and transparency.
Joining Arena Club in August 2023, Agrawal manages and has grown team of over a dozen engineers and quality engineers across the U.S., UK and Asia, and spearheaded the introduction of Slab Packs, an innovative product in the trading card industry that provides a transparent way for buying slabbed cards in the form of repacks. This follows two years as agile tech lead and engineering manager for eBay in London, where he led a global team of engineers to create technological improvements, grow the international reach of eBay’s shipping platform, and bring payments onto a safer and faster internal platform which increased net sales more than 30% to $120 million.
Previously, Agrawal spent two years as a software engineer, then senior software engineer, for the travel metasearch engine Skyscanner London, leading initiatives that brought a self-serve approach to the platform’s services while forming and mentoring a community of data quality champions. He served as a software engineer for CapitalOne in London after beginning his career as an app developer for JPMorgan Chase. Vartul Agrawal received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Manchester and an MBA from Cornell.
Company: Arena Club
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Vartul Agrawal: As the Head of Engineering at Arena Club, I’m responsible for overseeing our entire engineering function, which includes leading our technical teams, driving product development, and ensuring that our platform is both scalable and secure. My role also involves close collaboration with leadership to align engineering efforts with business objectives. I was brought on board because of my proven ability to lead engineering organizations and my experience in scaling platforms efficiently. The combination of my technical background and business mindset allowed me to fit seamlessly into a leadership role where I could influence both strategy and execution.
About the company, there is a great deal! Arena Club is a collectibles marketplace – including everything from sports cards to Pokemon to celebrity must-haves – that combines traditional trading with modern technology and transparency. Our core product features grading, secure vaulting, slab packs and trading using the marketplace for collectibles. In the grand scope, we at Arena Club are focused at bringing transparency and trust in the collectibles space. What differentiates us is our focus on building a community-driven platform, where collectors can trade, engage, and showcase their collections in a secure environment. The integration of digital and physical assets, along with our use of blockchain to provide transparent ownership records, really sets us apart in this space.
What specific areas of your business have been most impacted by AI, and how?
Vartul Agrawal: Arena Club has evolved significantly with regards to AI, particularly in how we manage and scale with traffic bursts. Since joining, I’ve led efforts to build a more scalable, modular architecture that allows us to quickly iterate and deploy new features. One of the significant changes I spearheaded was improving our platform’s infrastructure to better handle peak traffic loads while maintaining high security standards. We’ve also enhanced our DevOps practices, ensuring faster and more reliable deployments. These changes have helped Arena Club keep pace with user demand while continuing to innovate in the space.
On a larger scale, Arena Club was built from the beginning with transparency and consistency in grading and authentication as the main driving force. To achieve this, our team uses several machine learning and particularly computer vision models to power our AI based grading and authentication system for collectible cards. We look at comparable cards (this includes cards that have already been in our system and publicly available data in the card marketplace) to verify the authenticity of each individual item we receive. We also have bounds in place to measure the size of the cards. A major challenge in collectible card grading is to ensure that these cards are not physically trimmed or altered in any way.
How are you ensuring ethical considerations are taken into account in your use of AI?
Vartul Agrawal: Absolutely, ethical considerations with the use of AI are especially necessary when we consider how our process of utilizing AI makes the hobby and love for collecting more accessible. Our approach to digital first opens the hobby to everyone, especially someone who doesn’t have a card shop near them to take part in the hobby. Collectors can additionally ship their cards to their homes, effectively making the AI grading physical and ensuring that they can keep or market their cards with secure, authentic value.
We also ensure ethical use of AI by removing any grader biases on the training data. These cards can hold very high monetary and sentimental value for the collectors, hence, we also add a human to our AI grading process to ensure the correctness of the models. The model continuously learns from its mistakes.
Even more, our work at Arena Club is committed to the in-person value of the collecting hobby. Arena Club’s goals include expanding our platform to offer more features that enhance the collector experience, growing our user base, and continuing to innovate with technology that ensures the security and transparency of transactions.
What advice would you give to other CEOs looking to integrate AI into their business?
Vartul Agrawal: The biggest advice I would give to engineers, tech executives, and businesses overall looking to integrate AI would be to both embrace change and respect your peers, learning from them in this ever evolving sphere of technology. Being a tech executive means leading technically but, even more than that, also leading personally with empathy to ensure the success of our team overall. Technology will continue to change, and it is also our job to continue growing.
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
Vartul Agrawal: A big part of our vision at Arena Club is to bring the excitement and liveliness of physical card shows into a digital space. We want to capture that energy—the joy of discovering new cards, making trades on the spot, and connecting with fellow collectors—and make it possible for users to experience that same thrill from anywhere. We hope to continue with that mission, shifting the perspective of collectors who were initially hesitant. With the collector, we want them to embrace the convenience and transparency of the digital platform, how it can enhance their collecting experience rather than subvert it. Watching that transformation firsthand day-to-day, from skepticism to trust and excitement, is a powerful reminder of the impact Arena Club is having on the hobby and will continue to have over the next 5 years.
This will also dictate the evolution of AI in the collectible industry. We already see innovation happening in the space where collectors can simply take a picture of their card to get a predicted grade. That is where I see the future with AI and computer vision, where collectors can do everything from the comfort of their homes using a simple picture and their phones.
