Inkitt, a Berlin, Germany-based reader-powered publisher, secured $16m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, angel investor Itai Tsiddon, Xploration Capital, Redalpine Capital, Speedinvest, and Earlybird.
The company intends to use the funds to expand to more genres, include ten new languages on Inkitt, and continue efforts to grow readership and audience through the Galatea app.
Led by Founder and CEO Ali Albazaz, Inkitt is an online community of over 1.6 million readers and 110,000 writers who have collectively written over 350,000 stories. Using reading data collected from these users, Inkitt identifies the top-performing stories and adapts them, through its in-house team of writers, into short form immersive mini episodes which are then published through the Galatea app.
Launched just six months ago, Galatea is an immersive fiction reading app that brings stories to life through the addition of sound and visual effects, chat fiction, audio drama, and vibrations.
Galatea is available to download on iOS and Google Play.
FinSMEs
28/08/2019