Content community Kinolights(키노라이츠) has raised $1.5 million (KRW 2 billion) in Series A funding. This brings Kinolights’ cumulative funding to approximately $3.7 million (KRW 5 billion).
The Series A round was led by Z Venture Capital (hereinafter referred to as ZVC), with existing investor Kakao Ventures participating in a follow-on investment. ZVC is the corporate-led venture capital (CVC) arm of LY Corporation, a consolidated entity that includes Z Holdings, LINE and Yahoo! Kakao Ventures has participated in all three consecutive investment rounds, including the most recent seed round.
Kinolights made headlines in 2021 when it officially launched its OTT integrated search feature, which allows users to search for movies and TV shows they want to watch and connect them to OTT services such as Netflix, Coupang Play, TVING, Disney Plus, Wavve, Apple TV+, and WATCHA for instant viewing.
Since then, Kinolights has expanded into an integrated OTT information service and launched an OTT ranking chart that shows domestic OTT trends at a glance, establishing itself as a benchmark for content success in the industry.
In September 2022, Kinolights launched a new content community based on movies and celebrities, leveraging the strength of the metadata accumulated over the course of the service, with over 500,000 app downloads and a steady increase in ad-free monthly active users (MAUs), growing to over 800,000 content consumers every month.
Yousik Han and Jeemin Seo, venture capitalists at Z Venture Capital, who led the investment, said: “The pandemic has restructured the value creation mechanisms of the video media content industry and intensified competition. Kinolights, with its mission to connect good content to more people, will help grow the industry’s pie by acting as a sitter and bridger between people, information, content and services”.
Joon-young Yang, CEO of Kinolights, said, “The content industry has undergone major tectonic shifts in recent years, including generative AI, AVOD/FAST and short-form drama,” “With this investment, we will quickly respond to market changes to become a service that captures the entire consumption journey of domestic and global content consumers.”
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