Our investment in Flagcat, a studio redefining the future of webtoon!
Today, we are proud to unveil our investment in Flagcat’s €2m Seed round alongside our friends at Seedcamp, Purple, Motier Ventures, Super Capital and word-class BAs such as Julien Chaumont, Irwan Bello or Vincent Nallatamby!
Flagcat is tackling the fast-growing $7b webtoon market! Born in South Korea, Webtoons have become increasingly popular over the last few years, reaching hundreds of millions of readers across the world. Webtoons draw their origins directly from traditional manga, with comparable art styles, themes and storylines. Their distribution, however, is completely different: webtoons are mobile and online first, consumed on a vertical format and must abide to a strict publication schedule (engineered to get readers hooked): each franchise needs to release one episode a week, always on the same day at the same hour.
Top webtoon IPs are becoming billion dollar franchises, often exporting to other platforms like Netflix! For example, “All of Us Are Dead”, based on the webtoon “Now at Our School”, was Netflix’s 5th most popular non-english series debut when it released its first season in 2022.
As webtoons gain traction internationally, their market size is expected to balloon to more than $60 billion by 2030.
Despite the high-frequency production constraints put on studios, production techniques remain very manual. Studios employ armies of graphic designers working day and night! This has historically led to high levels of burnout for creatives in that industry, and sometimes poor quality standards.
Here comes Flagcat, which is creating a new studio from the ground up, revolutionizing content production workflows. The founding team has built tools to assist graphic designers and illustrators in their work.
From our first meeting with the Flagcat team, it was obvious to us that we needed to partner with them. Jeff, the CEO at Flagcat, is an experienced entrepreneur, who was one of the first French to join a YC company, AirHelp, back in 2015, and help them scale from 10 to 300 employees. He is also a writer in his spare time, and has a deep passion for the manga culture. Quentin is the CTO at Flagcat and in charge of developing the webtoon creation engine. Finally, Remi is an autodidact coder who started SortieManga as a side project in 2019, before it became a go-to website for webtoon fans across Europe, gathering 1.5 million visitors per month!
This unique asset, combined with their unique prototyping engine, is used by the Flagcat team to test and iterate on new concepts at lightning speed, by leveraging this proprietary feedback loop.
Flagcat was born less than a year ago, but it did not take long for the team to come up with their first IP: “Writers”, which caught the attention of the best Korean webtoon publishers. In everything they do, Flagcat’s ambition is to produce “bangers”, IPs which have the potential to become billion dollar franchises!
We are very excited to onboard for the Flagcat journey and help building a leading webtoon studio!
