Terapin Studios acquires Korea’s Toomics after raising $93m

Terapin Studios, a US-headquartered digital content producer, has acquired Toomics, one of South Korea’s top 5 webtoon platforms, after raising $93 million from Affirma Capital and NPX Private Equity.

According to the announcement, Affirma Capital invested $38 million in Terapin Studios as part of a $93 million co-investment made with NPX Private Equity, a Korea-based private equity firm.

Toomics serves webtoon series in 10 languages globally including Korean, English, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Toomics generated more than USD 50 million of revenue and continued to record a stable profit in 2021.

Due to the recent rapid expansion of global operations, the revenue contribution from the ex-Korean business has almost quadrupled over the past 3 years to account for more than 70% in 2021.

Following the acquisition, Toomics is expected to become a pivotal part of the digital content value chain under the Terapin umbrella.

Another key subsidiary of Terapin is Copin Communications Inc. (“Copin”), one of Korea’s largest webtoon production studios that has internalized the development of original IP in the form of web fiction and webtoons.

Based on AI technology jointly developed with its affiliate, Copin has an industry-leading production system characterized by process automatization. Copin is on track to being capable to create more than 100 webtoon series every year with a minimal dependency on a few creators.

Through its subsidiaries and investments, Copin is also converting original IP into a variety of digital content forms such as TV shows, animations, web dramas and games in order to realize one-source-multi-use opportunities (OSMU).

Copin’s strong production capabilities in romance and fantasy genres are expected to serve as an effective
leverage when expanding worldwide.

“In the rapidly changing global digital contents market, Korean content has been under focused attention from consumers around the world. This is not a temporary fad but a secular trend that reflects the potential of Korean content to continuously attract global consumers,” Samuel Hwang, CEO of Terapin Studios, said.

Terapin Studios is a company that does global business covering games, dramas, and animations based on the IP of webtoons, a new type of media in Korea. With its vision to become a global content leader, Terapin Studios plans to make content production to the next generation, creating immersive experiences in the form of game, metaverse, and NFTs.