Inkitt founder and CEO Ali Abazaz
About 2 years ago Redalpine led the Seed investment round in Inkitt (Redalpine Capital III). We shared the vision of Ali Albazaz, Inkitt’s founder and CEO, to disrupt the publishing industry with the help of data-driven technologies to uncover writing talent everywhere and give them access to a global audience.
On the back of their achievements over the past years, Ali and his team have just closed a $16m Series A round, led by leading Silicon Valley VC Kleiner Perkins. Holtzbrinck Ventures, Xploration Capital and Lightricks founder Itai Tsiddon also joined as new investors with existing investors Redalpine, Speedinvest and Earlybird participating.
With its model, Inkitt is taking a completely novel approach to publishing. Instead of relying on editors’ gut decisions, the company is using data to identify high potential stories.
Inkitt is the world’s first reader-powered publisher and what makes it so powerful is the full coverage of the entire chain from content sourcing to distribution: content is sourced on the Inkitt platform, with 1.6m readers and 110’000 writers that have uploaded 350’000 stories. Inkitt uses reading data to identify the stories with best-seller potential and has an in-house team of writers to adapt the top-performing ones to the proprietary Galatea app format.
The Galatea app offers immersive fiction tailored to the smartphone generation. The reading experience is full with sound and haptic effects that are in sync with the story. The stories come in short episodes, perfectly suited for reading on the go.
Since its launch 6 months ago, the app has hit a nerve with users, growing quickly to a $6m run rate. With the newly raised funds, Inkitt will expand into more genres, add ten new languages and grow reach and readership through the Galatea app. It aims to help hundreds of yet undiscovered authors achieve global success.
Inkitt’s vision is to go full circle with democratizing publishing by covering additional distribution channels and media, including audio, TV, movies and games.
The funding round has been covered on a variety of channels, including TechCrunch.
Comments