Singapore-based digital comics platform INKR announced today it has secured US$3.1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.
Stu Levy, founder and CEO of TokyoPop, and David Do, MD of VI Management, also joined the round.
The funding will be used to increase its content catalogue, further expand its product development and marketing to grow its user base, and for talent acquisition.
Founded in October 2020 by three Vietnamese comics fanatics Ken Luong, Khoa Nguyen, and Hieu Tran, INKR envisions a world where all comics are universally accessible to readers and where creators can take their comics to any reader in the world.
The company’s AI-driven personalised content recommendation engine enables readers to access more than 800 localised manga, manhua, webtoon, and graphics novels across different genres on any device.
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The platform also helps comic publishers and creators bring their content globally through its proprietary AI localisation technology and publishing tools.
Currently, INKR has partnerships with over 70 publishers and creators, including Image Comics, Kodansha USA, Kuaikan, Mr. Blue, TokyoPop. These companies can utilise INKR’s tools to localise content in hours and distribute it globally to comics readers in over 100 countries and regions.
The platform currently supports English for its Comics app, and Japanese-English, Korean-English, and Chinese-English localisation, and plans to support additional languages in the future.
The company claims to have witnessed a 200 per cent growth in monthly active users.
INKR taps into a thriving market that the company boasts of US$10 billion. Meanwhile, the global traditional comics book market was only valued at US$4 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 3.3 per cent during 2022-2027, according to Global Comic Book Market 2021-2026 Research Report.
“Comics have the power to transport us to entirely new worlds, teach enduring values, and nurture our imagination. We believe that everyone should be able to read any comic even if they do not know the language. In reality, not everyone can enjoy comics easily and officially due to the prohibitively high cost of localization and complex licensing process for content creators and publishers. So we want to change that,” said Ken Luong, CEO, and co-founder of INKR.
Analytics, intelligent personalised feeds and flexible monetisation plans, such as ad-supported, subscription, and pay-per-chapter, are also included in the suite of tools for publishers.
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Image Credit: INKR
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