Inkitt is a reader-powered publisher, offering an online community for talented authors and book lovers. The Berlin-based company just announced that it has secured €14.5 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, angel investor Itai Tsiddon, Xploration Capital, Redalpine Capital, Speedinvest and Earlybird.
The company wants to use the new investment to help hundreds of undiscovered authors find global success. Inkitt claims it has a 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.
The most popular series on Galatea, The Millennium Wolves, is selling faster than Harry Potter did within the same period of time, boasting an impressive $1 million dollars in sales in the first six months after release. The series is based on an original novel written by Sapir Englard, a 24-year-old writer living outside Jerusalem, who has been using the royalties earned on Galatea to finance her studies at the Berklee College of Music.
Inkitt, Founder and CEO, Ali Albazaz, said: “For centuries publishing has remained unchanged, apart from the introduction of ebooks – which really isn’t that groundbreaking. With Inkitt, we’ve fundamentally reinvented how upcoming authors are discovered globally and with Galatea we’ve revolutionized how consumers interact with these stories.”