Inkitt, a self-described data-driven publishing company, has raised a further $37 million to fund an expansion into AI-generated books, audiobooks, video, and games.
The company, which launched in Berlin in 2013—initially to provide a platform for self-published writers—attracted investors, including Stefan von Holtzbrinck, the owner of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, and former Penguin CEO Michael Lynton; it has now pulled in a total of $117 million in investments. In February 2023, the Financial Times said that Inkitt was the eighth fastest growing company in Europe, and #1 in Germany.
What have investors gotten for their money? A publishing house that, much like Wattpad, takes in self-published authors and publishes user-generated content. Readers can read stories for free, subscribe to new content, follow and create a community around an author. Inkitt, then, crunching data and employing proprietary algorithms, determines which work has the most commercial potential. That work is then promoted and sold on the company's Galatea platform.
Like at Wattpad, much of the work on offer at Inkitt falls into mass-market genres including crime, erotica, fantasy, romance, science fiction, and thrillers. At the end of last year, the company launched GalateaTV, a mobile platform for short form video based on the company's romance novels.
In announcing its latest round of financing, Inkitt said that it now has 33 million users and, on its website, claims that "one of every two authors published on Galatea go on to become bestsellers." The company does not reveal by what metric they determine a book to be a bestseller, though the publisher states that it has had titles that have generated more than $1 million in revenue. In a LinkedIn post at the end of 2023, founder Ali Albazaz said that the company had 133 authors "whose stories reached bestseller status."
Among Inkitt’s plans are to use the new financing to develop AI-generated and personalized fiction—using such large language models as ChatGPT and Anthropic, and DeepL for machine translation—as well as AI-generated audiobooks, videos, and games. The company already offers several AI-powered features, including a Choose Your Own Narrator audiobook option, Character chatbot, a graphic novels generator, and a summary tool, among others.
In 2022, Inkitt opened a new headquarters in San Francisco. In announcing the move, Albazaz said that the company aspired to become a "21st Century Disney," and added that opening theme parks was not out of the question. The company won a "Top Workplaces in San Francisco" award from the San Francisco Chronicle.
