The category lost some of its luster as several promising upstarts failed to achieve venture-scale growth and as buzzier topics like artificial intelligence grabbed investors’ attention.
Yet, entrepreneurs Agnes Kozera and David Kierzkowski bucked the trend, closing in July a $2.5 million pre-seed round for their new writing and animation startup Storiaverse.
The pair’s fundraising success was buoyed by their track record of launching and exiting companies in the creator space. They sold in 2016 their influencer-marketing upstart FameBit to Google. They then launched a podcast-advertising marketplace, Podcorn, which Entercom (now called Audacy) purchased in 2021 at a $22.5 million valuation.
Storiaverse is focused on a different segment of the creator economy.
Launched in April, the app uses text, animation, and audio to tell stories in a format the company describes as “read-watch.” A typical story flips between text and animation as a reader scrolls, offering an animated version of the graphic-novel format. Early content partners include the book publisher HarperCollins Publishers and animator King Science.
Kozera and Kierzkowski’s existing relationships with investors helped the cofounders close their Storiaverse round. The company’s pre-seed was led by 500 Global, a firm that also invested in the cofounders’ earlier startups.
“They really get the creator space and our vision and we’re really aligned for what we wanted to accomplish,” Kozera told Business Insider.
Kozera said that when pitching Storiaverse to potential investors, many were curious about how AI could impact its business going forward.
“There’s just been a lot of conversations around AI,” she said. “That’s been a repetitive thing that has come up with almost every investor … asking how are we thinking about that in the future.”
Generative-AI tools swept the creator industry last year, though some creators have pushed back against the tech. Storiaverse said it could see a world where AI assists creators with their work, but the company plans to leave the decision on whether to use the tech to the creators themselves. The company doesn’t view it as a replacement for human talent, Kozera said.
“There’s actually a little bit of resistance we’re seeing to AI, which is really interesting as well,” Kozera said. “Audiences will say, ‘Oh, is this AI created? I’m not that excited if it is.'”
Kozera and Kierzkowski pitched Storiaverse before it launched in April, which meant the pair didn’t have any revenue or user-growth data to share with prospective investors. Instead, they focused on the potential market size, why now was the right time to launch a new storytelling platform, and how they plan to make money.
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