The New York-based digital comics platform GlobalComix is enhancing its 300,000-title library with the AI localisation engine of INKR and bringing in new leadership to expand its operations.
While demand for manga outside Japan is high, the challenge lies in infrastructure. Manga is a rapidly growing publishing category in the U.S., fueled by adaptations of popular franchises like Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan. However, translating and distributing comics across different languages and screen sizes remains a largely manual endeavor, with the existing industry toolchain unable to handle such tasks at speed and scale.
GlobalComix is aiming to resolve this issue. The company recently announced a $13 million funding round led by SBI US Gateway Fund and Point72 Ventures. They also appointed Henrik Rydberg as chief executive and acquired INKR, an AI platform for comics localisation.
The announcements emphasize GlobalComix’s ambition to be more than just a reading platform; it seeks to become the infrastructure layer for global comics publishing. Participants in the funding round included Scrum Ventures, Wise Ventures, Wicklow Capital, and Upside VC. The collaboration between Japanese and U.S. investors aligns with the goal of connecting global creators, publishers, and readers. The acquisition of INKR introduces advanced AI technology to automate labor-intensive steps in localizing comics, significantly reducing processing time and broadening the platform’s capabilities.
Founded in 2019 by Ken Luong, Khoa Nguyen, and Hieu Tran, INKR’s technology has already localized over 15,000 comics, boasting efficiency in text and object detection, image cleaning, translation, and typesetting. The collaboration seeks to integrate this AI pipeline with GlobalComix’s existing infrastructure, transforming the comics industry’s approach to global distribution and monetization.
GlobalComix aims to streamline the process of localizing and distributing manga, potentially capturing a share of the $20 billion global manga market. The success of this endeavor will depend on the quality of AI localization to meet publishing standards and whether publishers entrust them with valuable intellectual property, an area where INKR’s established trust plays a crucial role.