A 29-year-old South Korean entrepreneur has snagged funding from SoftBank Group Corp.’s venture arm and Kakao Page Corp. to realize his ambition of creating the go-to app for online fiction.
His firm, New York-based Radish, raised $63.2 million (¥6.68 billion) in a first round of financing from investors including the Japanese conglomerate and Korean social media company.
The 4-year-old company now aims to become the Netflix Inc. of reading apps, by hiring a hundred scriptwriters, including Hollywood veterans, to collaborate on original novels in a serialized or episodic format, according to co-founder Seung-yoon Lee.