Miniswap raises £2.6m to improve Warhammer price discovery with AI taxonomy
This article covers Miniswap, an ecommerce startup, which has raised £2.6m ($3.5m) following its participation in Y Combinator. The funding will back a purpose-built marketplace for Warhammer miniatures, targeting collectors and competitive players with specialised catalogue, search and provenance tools.
Miniswap, an ecommerce startup founded by Cambridge University alumni Will Hanna and Zak Singh, has raised £2.6m ($3.5m) following its participation in Y Combinator. The round backs a purpose-built marketplace for Warhammer miniatures, a niche made up of highly engaged collectors and competitive players that current general marketplaces do not serve well.
Why it matters
Hobbyist markets can be large and specialised but are often shoehorned into broad e-commerce platforms that lack the data, provenance and tooling collectors need. Miniswap’s financing signals investor appetite for consumer products built around deep domain expertise and community tooling rather than generic growth plays. The announcement is notable also because it comes from a Y Combinator batch dominated by artificial intelligence startups, making Miniswap an outlier focused on community-led commerce.
Inside the product
Miniswap is designed to handle the particular complexities of tabletop miniatures trading. The platform combines a detailed catalogue, search and valuation features, and community-oriented functions tailored to how collectors buy, sell and value items. The company says its catalogue covers every miniature manufactured over the past decade and that it uses AI-assisted systems to construct a taxonomy of tabletop wargaming miniatures intended to enable more precise listings and valuations.
For Warhammer players — who often invest significant time and money into collections and require accurate provenance for limited or variant models — those features reduce friction compared with listing on general marketplaces. Miniswap plans to use the new funding to expand catalogue coverage, develop social and community features, and prepare to support other tabletop and collector communities beyond Warhammer.
In the announcement, Will Hanna, co-founder and COO at Miniswap, said:
In a world where nearly every pitch deck is focused on AI agents, we are building a consumer marketplace for a deeply passionate niche. Warhammer is a sneaky big market that has been consistently underserved. Investors backed us because they recognise how many similar communities exist, where depth and domain expertise matter more than generic scale.
Who are the investors?
The company publicly states the raise was completed after Miniswap participated in Y Combinator; the press release does not list a lead investor or participating syndicate. The £2.6m ($3.5m) figure and the YC connection are the only disclosed investor details. The founders frame the pitch to backers around serving a dense, addressable niche where specialist data and tooling can create durable marketplace advantages.
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Founder perspective
Zak Singh, co-founder and CEO, is a former PhD candidate in Computer Science at Cambridge and a Warhammer player for more than 20 years. He led development of the platform’s core infrastructure and the AI-assisted taxonomy. Will Hanna, co-founder and COO, left law school to focus on Miniswap and brings a background in strategic communications and entrepreneurship. Their combined experience underpins the product’s mix of technical capability and community insight.
The bigger picture
Miniswap’s approach reflects a wider trend: investors and founders exploring verticalised marketplaces that trade rapid growth assumptions for higher unit economics and defensibility rooted in data and community. For niche retail categories such as collectibles, specialist marketplaces can offer better price discovery, provenance and ancillary services than generalist platforms.
This deal also highlights the UK’s continued role in producing consumer marketplaces out of university ecosystems such as Cambridge, and shows that accelerator pipelines like Y Combinator still back consumer-focused projects alongside the prevailing AI theme. As Miniswap expands, its progress will be worth watching for anyone tracking how startups monetise hobbyist communities across Europe and beyond.
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