Finally, there may soon be an app to fill the digital comics void left by Comixology. Wednesday, GlobalComix announced it had acquired a massive new cash infusion. In total, the digital comics platform raised a sizable $13 million in a funding round led by SBI US Gateway Fund and Point72 Ventures.
First reported by Forbes‘ Rob Salkowitz, this round of funding nearly doubles that of the previous round obtained just about three years ago. Then, GlobalComix announced it had obtained $6.5 million in capital.
The new cash infusion also comes with some structural changes to the platform’s C-suite. GlobalComix co-founder Christopher Carter is moving into an innovation and technology-based role. His role atop the company will now be filled by former operations lead Henrik Rydberg.
“Growth continues to accelerate,” Rydberg told in the Forbes announcement. “We are continuing to develop our relationship with publishers. The traction around manga is evident and obvious. And while the US remains our biggest consumer base, we’re seeing a good amount of growth from other countries as well.”
Rydberg added GlobalComix has seen 20% month-to-month traffic increases after signing comics’ largest publishers like Marvel and DC to digital deals. As a part of the deal, GlobalComix has also acquired INKR, a startup platform similar enough to GlobalComix, though it focuses on Japanese, Chinese, and Korean comics and manga.
“We’ve been having conversations with our publisher partners around creating a cadence that builds repeat readers and habits. Manga and Webtoon have been thinking about this problem space for quite a while, and they have a certain perspective on what they think of the cadence of Webtoon,” Rydberg added. “But from a publishing perspective, the digital channel ability to see, activate and return traffic over and over again with certain kind of cadence has been something that we’ve been having very fruitful conversations with publishers, around how the subscription and a la carte work together.”
In a move that is sure to raise some eyebrows amongst creative types, INKR is also home to several AI-assisted tools for translating, formatting, and distributing comics. This follows on the heels of a GlobalComix job opening seemingly suggesting the platform uses AI at some point in its workflow.
In a job listing posted to LinkedIn earlier this month, it’s suggested the company’s “engineering team and their AI workflows handle execution at speed.” Generative AI, of course, has been a major topic in creative communities of late as artwork and comics have been fed to train large language models (LLM), effectively stealing the work of artists without providing compensation in return.
“AI as a technology gets a lot of attention,” Rydberg said of the technology. “We see creators as the very heart of storytelling. But the same way we use computers and software to paint, we want to extend tools to creators and translators to amplify what they’re doing, to make their lives easier and more efficient. We are not in the business of creating foundational models.”
