Comic-book upstart Dstlry announced this month it raised a $5 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $7.4 million since 2022 when cofounders Chip Mosher and David Steinberger began working on the project.
Dstlry is a comic-book publishing platform that gives creators an equity cut and resale royalties, offering more potential upside for artists and writers than traditional comics publishers. It also runs a marketplace for customers to resell digital editions, verifying authenticity via the company’s ledger system.
Mosher and Steinberger have lived and breathed comic books for more than a decade. Steinberger cofounded the comic-book platform Comixology in 2007, where Mosher would later serve as head of content. The pair joined Amazon in 2014 after it acquired the upstart, helping to shape the tech giant’s digital comics and manga content experience.
That background gave the pair a leg up when it came time to fundraise for Dstlry, Steinberger told Business Insider.
“In seed funding, I think investors put as much on the people as the idea,” he said. “Selling a company to Amazon is a proof point. Running worldwide comics there is a proof point.”
The company’s recent round was led by 1AM Gaming. Other investors include publishers Kodansha and Delcourt, former Warner Bros. executive Lorenzo di Bonaventura, tech investor Mike Vorhaus, and video-game veteran John Schappert.
Even with strong backgrounds in comics, the fundraising environment was “weird,” Steinberger said, particularly given how much artificial-intelligence has infiltrated the imaginations of VCs.
Dstlry’s story for investors was rooted in its content and relationships with human creators. It’s a media publisher that operates a marketplace with some Web3 components that allow it to verify ownership. But it’s specifically built not to feel like a platform for NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. “The fun of digital collecting without the blockchain BS,” the company wrote on its website.
The company is betting on original, human-made content and using technology to bring that front and center. For example, it recently added the ability for creators to digitally sign and sketch on new comic-book editions.
“I think that more and more, human-made items and artifacts are going to be a value,” he said. “We’ve kind of swam against the trends.”
In its 36-page pitch deck to investors, the company highlighted its cofounders’ backgrounds, outlined how its platform helps creators and customers, touted the success of the three projects Dstlry published in 2023, and teased how it plans to expand the business.
BI is publishing 26 key slides, excluding some with repeated or redacted information such as Dstlry’s valuation, run rate, and proprietary business plans.
In the pitch, the cofounders said they preferred to have fewer words on slides as they believed it’s better to describe something to investors rather than have them read it off of a slide.
“We spent a lot of time on the deck trying to really refine the storytelling,” Steinberger said. “Obviously, we love comic books, and comic books have an economy of storytelling, and we wanted the deck to reflect the fun of the industry that we work in.”
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