Serial Box Attracts $4.5M in Investment Funding

Serial Box, a digital publishing venture that serializes original fiction in e-book and audiobook formats, announced that it has raised $4.5 million in seed financing from investors.

The investment came from a variety of entertainment, technology and consumer industry investors. Investors include Boat Rocker Media, Forerunner Ventures, entrepreneur Todd Wagner, and Japanese business and media firm Uzabase.

This follows an investment round of $1.65 million that Serial Box received in early 2018. Serial Box investors also include Richard Sarnoff, former co-chair of Bertelsmann, Michael Edelstein, former President of NBCUniversal International Studios, Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, and Mattias Lundgren, CEO of Word Audio Publishing in Sweden.

Kirsten Green, Founding Partner, Forerunner Ventures, said, “We believe Serial Box is meeting the market where it is headed with an all-new content creation model, offering mobile, short, flexible content, powered by television-style Writers Rooms that can release titles 5x faster than a traditional book.”

Modelled after TV shows, Serial Box creates serialized fiction written by teams of writers. The venture has produced two dozen original titles. Last year Serial Box announced an agreement with Marvel Comics to produce a series of stories about such Marvel heroes as Black Panther, Black Widow, Jessica Jones and Thor.

Serial Box CEO/Founder Molly Barton, said, the new round of investors “see the big opportunity that we do to retool reading for the smartphone age, to take the best elements of traditional book publishing and innovate with influences from the audio, podcast, gaming and TV industries.”