The New York digital comics platform is combining its 300,000-title library with INKR’s AI localisation engine, and bringing in new leadership to execute the expansion.
The problem with getting manga into the hands of readers outside Japan is not demand. Manga is the fastest-growing category in American book publishing; global interest has been building for years, accelerated by streaming adaptations of franchises like Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan, and Jujutsu Kaisen.
The problem is infrastructure. Translating, reformatting, and distributing a comics series across languages and screen sizes is still a largely manual process, and the industry’s publishing toolchain has never been built to handle it at speed or at scale.
GlobalComix, the New York-based digital comics platform, is betting it can fix that. On Wednesday the company announced three moves at once: a $13 million funding round, the appointment of Henrik Rydberg as chief executive, and the acquisition of INKR, a Singapore-founded AI localisation platform for comics.
Together, the announcements describe a company that wants to be not just a reading destination but the infrastructure layer beneath the global comics publishing industry.
The $13 million round was co-led by SBI US Gateway Fund, the US arm of SBI, one of Japan’s most active venture capital firms with more than 1,200 portfolio companies, and Point72 Ventures, the venture arm of Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management.
Point72 Ventures previously led GlobalComix’s $6.5 million Series A in July 2023 and returns here as co-lead. Additional participants include Scrum Ventures, Wise Ventures, Wicklow Capital, and Upside VC.
The Japan-US investor pairing is deliberate. SBI’s network spans Japanese media and publishing, the market that produces manga, while Point72 brings continuity and US market perspective.
Shohei Yamada, Managing Partner of SBI US Gateway Fund, described GlobalComix as “building the infrastructure that connects creators, publishers, and readers worldwide,” adding that he believed it had the potential to make manga and comics “accessible to anyone, anywhere.”
Ishan Sinha, now a Partner at Point72 Ventures who led the 2023 Series A, said the addition of INKR’s AI team and localisation technology “meaningfully expands what the platform can support for creators and publishers.”
The INKR acquisition brings the most technically substantive element of the announcement.
INKR was founded in 2019 by Ken Luong, Khoa Nguyen, and Hieu Tran, a team based in Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City, and launched its app in October 2020.
The platform’s core product is an AI localisation engine that automates the most labour-intensive steps in preparing a comic for a new language market: text and object detection, image cleaning, translation, and typesetting.
The company says the technology reduces localisation time from days to hours and has been used to localise more than 15,000 comics, though that figure comes from GlobalComix’s press materials and has not been independently verified.
GlobalComix’s platform currently hosts more than 300,000 titles from publishers including Marvel, DC, Kodansha, Image Comics, and Tokyopop, alongside more than 25,000 independent creators.
The company’s ambition is to combine INKR’s localisation pipeline with its existing distribution and monetisation infrastructure, effectively creating a vertically integrated system: a publisher brings a Japanese title in, the AI engine prepares it for English, French, or Brazilian Portuguese markets, and GlobalComix handles distribution and revenue.
The global manga market is estimated to exceed $20 billion annually, with demand for translated content growing across the West.
Whether GlobalComix can capture meaningful share of that workflow, against established players including Viz Media, Yen Press, and digital platforms like WEBTOON, depends on whether the AI localisation quality is good enough for professional publishing standards and whether publishers will trust a startup with their most valuable IP.
The acquisition of INKR, whose technology is described as already trusted by publishers in Japan and Korea, is the clearest attempt to answer that second question before it is asked.
