Kakao Entertainment Corp, a Korean music, content and talent company with a division offering web cartoons and novels, has made two acquisitions: the mobile storytelling provider Tapas, founded in 2012, for $510m and mobile fiction app Radish, established in 2015, for a further $440m.
The company has partnered with both newly-acquired companies in recent years and took an initial stake in Tapas in November last year. Tapas produces webcomics and novels and is experiencing high growth with titles such as The Beginning After The End which has been heavily distributed in Korea and Japan. The platform, which partners with major publishing houses, including PRH and Hachette, has 8.6m users who have generated 8bn views, predominantly in North America. It also has a community platform called Tapastry which allows storytellers to find an audience for their content.
Radish has seen similar growth with serialised fiction, aiming to compete with TV drama, connecting authors and readers in live chat and allowing users to upload their own content. Kakao now expects to expand substantially in North America as a result of these deals. It also expects to expand into China and India later this year. Kakao offers a mobile content library of 80 items and has a music catalogue of 60,000 songs.
