Comic newcomer Dstlry announced this month It raised $5 million in seed funding, bringing total funding to $7.4 million since 2022, when co-founders Chip Mosher and David Steinberger began working on the project.
Dstlry is a comic publishing platform that gives creators a share of equity and royalties on resale, offering artists and writers more profit potential than traditional comic publishers. The company also operates a marketplace where customers can resell digital editions, with authenticity verified through the company’s accounting system.
Mosher and Steinberger have had comics on their minds for more than a decade. Steinberger co-founded comics platform Comixology in 2007, where Mosher later served as head of content. The pair joined Amazon in 2014 after Amazon acquired the startup, helping shape the tech giant’s digital comic and manga offerings.
That background gave the couple an advantage when it came to raising funds for Dstlry, Steinberger told Business Insider.
“I think when it comes to seed funding, investors value the people as much as the idea,” he said. “Selling a company to Amazon is proof. Publishing comics around the world there is proof.”
The company’s latest round was led by 1AM Gaming. Other investors include publishers Kodansha and Delcourt, former Warner Bros. executive Lorenzo di Bonaventura, technology investor Mike Vorhaus and video game veteran John Schappert.
Even with a strong knowledge of comics, the fundraising environment was “strange,” Steinberger says, especially given how much artificial intelligence has infiltrated the imaginations of venture capitalists.
Dstlry’s story for investors was rooted in its content and relationships with human creators. It’s a media publisher that runs a marketplace with some Web3 components that allow it to verify ownership. But it’s specifically built so that it doesn’t feel like a platform for NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. “The fun of digital collecting without the blockchain nonsense,” the company wrote on its website.
The company focuses on original, human-created content and uses technology to bring it to the forefront, for example recently introducing the ability for creators to digitally sign and outline new comic book issues.
“I think man-made objects and artifacts are becoming more and more valuable,” he said. “We’re kind of going against the trend.”
In its 36-page pitch deck for investors, the company shed light on the backgrounds of its co-founders, outlined how its platform helps developers and customers, touted the success of the three projects Dstlry will release in 2023, and hinted at how it plans to grow the business.
BI publishes 26 key slides, excluding some with repeated or redacted information such as Dstlry’s valuation, run rate, and proprietary business plans.
In their presentation, the co-founders said they preferred fewer words on the slides because they believed it was better to describe something to investors than to read it from a slide.
“We spent a lot of time really refining the storytelling,” Steinberger said. “Obviously we love comics, and comics have a certain economy of storytelling, and we wanted the deck to reflect the fun of the industry we work in.”
