LION ROCKET, webtoon creation AI startup, Raises Follow-on Investment from CJ Investment

Lion Rocket(라이언로켓), an AI startup that creates webtoons, has secured a follow-on investment from CJ Investment. The amount was not disclosed. Lion Rocket previously secured a $4.5 million (KRW 6 billion) bridge investment in December last year.

CJ Investment said it decided to invest based on Lion Rocket’s potential and market fit in 2024, the year of generative AI technology, as it has the best image-generating AI technology in Korea. Based on this investment, Lion Rocket plans to upgrade its technology, expand its business through its unique AI technology, and enter Japan to consolidate its leading position in the global AI webtoon market.

Lion Rocket, known for its AI Lee Hyeonse project, is a startup that is leading a paradigm shift in the content market with its image-generating AI technology. It has trained AI to create comics based on the works of cartoonist Lee Hyeonse and will release an episode (approximately 80 panels) of Lee’s “Karon’s Dawn” with AI in the first half of this year.

Lion Rocket’s AI webtoon production partner is Genvas. With its unique character fixation and motion control technology, webtoon production is 10 times faster and 50% cheaper than before. Using only Lion Rocket’s proprietary learning algorithm, it is possible to create high quality characters with only 10 training images and improve webtoon productivity by over 90% with its character fixation and pose control technology.

Previous image generation AI technologies, such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, are great for creating one-off images, but they are difficult to create continuous and consistent characters for webtoons, making them impossible to use in practice. Various works have been published to solve this problem, such as LoRA and Hypernetworks, but they have not easily met the expectations of the webtoon industry and readers due to problems such as requiring too much data and not maintaining character consistency after training.

Lion Rocket’s brain-boosting learning technology solves this problem and is an implementation of Lion Rocket’s technology that provides the most important ‘control’ when using generative AI technology in webtoons, and the key is to fix the consistency of the character with only 10 training data.

As Lion Rocket learns the artistic style of writers directly contracted by Lion Rocket and is only used to serialise the work, it is also free from the copyright issue of learning data.

Jie-Eun Park, Chief Investment Officer of CJ Investment, said: “While the application of generative AI to industry is still challenging, we believe Lion Rocket is a company with great technology and a clear market fit. We look forward to supporting Lion Rocket’s technological innovation and continued growth with this investment.

Seung Hwan Jung, CEO of Lion Rocket, said: “As a partner that helps people discover their favourite stories faster with generative AI technology, we have focused on overcoming various challenges in the webtoon production market with our technology. We will continue to support the growth of the webtoon market with Genvas’ unique image-generating AI technology and be a reliable and clear partner”.