Carpenstreetへの投資

Investing in Carpenstreet

According to KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency), global comics market is at W16.3trn as of 2021, in which Japan is the largest at W6.2trn (38%), followed by the US at W2.9trn (18%), Korea at W2.1trn (13%), and France at W1.3trn (8%).

Comics have been considered as an important original source of IPs within the contents market and relevant downstream industries. Especially, Japan and the US are considered ‘Global IP gold mine’, producing many successful IPs globally – Among top 10 global IPs that generated highest revenue as of Aug-21 YTD, 7 are Japan and US originated comics IP (e.g., Pokémon, Hello Kitty (Sanrio), Marvel, etc.).

Similar to Japan where most anime works start out as manga, in Korea, there are 80+ OSMU (One Source Multi Use) success cases of Korean digital comics (hereinafter, ‘webtoon’) IPs which successfully adapted to drama, movies, etc, as of 2024.

Started in 2000, Korean ‘Webtoon’ is known as a successful digitization/cultural export case, allowing comics (manga) to be easily read in mobile phones in a vertical format vs. traditional book-like format of published manga.

Even in Japan, the largest comics market, webtoon adoption has been increasing rapidly since the 2010s, with LINE Manga leading the market (according to Sensor Tower, LINE Manga was named #1 among Japan app market in terms of revenue as of Q1 2025). And as of 2024, webtoon now occupies c.73% of the total comics market, according to Kyodo News.

Started in 2019 as a digital asset marketplace platform, ‘ACON’, in which creators in various industries (e.g., architects, gamers, etc.) can sell their underutilized 3D asset models, Carpenstreet has successfully positioned itself within the Korea market as an essential tool for webtoon artists to improve background placement and drawing workload efficiency (as of 2022, ACON is used by c.55% of Korean full-time webtoon artists).

In H2 2024, the company officially launched background production software tool, ‘ABLUR’, in which artists can easily adjust and reproduce background cuts efficiently utilizing assets bought from ACON platform, thereby reducing cut production time from previously 2-3 hours/cut to a few minutes.

Their ACON asset library now incorporates not only manga but also game categories, and use cases are expanding beyond manga/webtoon industries, to even VTubers and games.

On the back of the increasing webtoon adoption in the Japanese comics market and Carpenstreet’s proven potential in the overseas market, and led by strong founder with domain expertise and strong network, we believe the company is opt to become the next Adobe of the contents market:

・Without any localization efforts (e.g., customer service, marketing, asset pool/product localization, etc.), GMV from ACON Japanese and English websites has been growing steadily. Moreover, artists from LINE Manga and the top 3 Japanese manga publishers have already registered to ACON platform, and have shown interest in ABLUR product as well, which we believe proved strong potential in the overseas market

・Carpenstreet’s CEO & Founder, Minhong Lee, is a manga-enthusiast, serial entrepreneur who is an experienced product manager having served as an early member of ‘Bucketplace’, a Korean #1 lifestyle tech startup operating ‘Ohouse’. Having been positioned as a webtoon industry (not only artists but also webtoon studios, AI startups, etc.)-friendly workflow efficiency tool, and seeking business opportunities with various industry players, we believe the company could well adapt to the rapid shift in webtoon industry landscape (including ongoing debate on the AI adoption of the webtoon industry)