Colin Kaepernick is launching an AI startup to empower manga creators

A new AI platform led by activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick aims to make it easier for anyone to publish—and monetize—their original stories as comics and manga.

Lumi Story AI, unveiled in beta form Wednesday, includes AI-powered tools designed to let anyone with so much as an idea develop full-fledged stories, says Kaepernick, the company’s founder and CEO. From the start, Lumi is designed to support people looking to create comic books, graphic novels, and manga with AI tools that can help flesh out characters conceptually and visually, draft and edit dialogue and text, and build full images for their work.

“Our focus is on democratizing storytelling,” Kaepernick says.

Once creators are satisfied with their projects, they’ll be able to publish and sell them through the Lumi platform, including digital and physical copies. Kaepernick, a published author and lifetime comic fan who also founded his own publishing company, says he hopes the AI assistance and publishing tools will help overcome some of the typical barriers and long production cycles traditionally inherent in getting work published and sold, enabling stories to be told that might otherwise go unheard.

Users who wish to sell accompanying merchandise—like T-shirts, mugs, and posters featuring story characters or scenes—will also be able to design and sell them through Lumi, which will handle manufacturing, sales, and shipping.

“We’ll handle all the logistics behind the scenes,” says Kaepernick. “One of the things that we’ve found is that creators love creating, and they want to focus on creating. Most of them do not want to be business operators.”

The platform will offer users three subscription tiers for access to various AI tools and take a cut of book and merchandise sales, but users will retain all rights to their work. That means that if they’re ever not satisfied with the Lumi experience or want to take advantage of other opportunities, they’ll be free to develop and sell their work elsewhere.

“They can publish it or merchandise it or monetize it anywhere else, which we think is a healthy relationship because it also pushes us to make sure that we’re providing the best service for creators,” Kaepernick says.

The company is also working on ways to compensate users if their work is used to train future AI models. Right now, Lumi is using a mix of specially trained third-party models and in-house technology. And while it’s far from the only AI-powered creative platform out there, the company is confident that the one-stop-shop approach will make it a good match for people looking to bring new stories into the world without having to navigate traditional publishing bureaucracies.

“Like many industries, if you want to become an author, that’s a gated industry,” says Cristina Apple Georgoulakis, a partner at venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which led Lumi’s $4 million seed round alongside Kapor Capital and Impellent Ventures. “The fact that Lumi is going to provide the distribution and the monetization, that creates an unlock and a system that allows people to actually thrive doing this artistic ability.”

Kaepernick says he and his team have spoken to would-be creators at a variety of skill levels, from those with a track record of developing existing projects to relative newcomers to writing and illustrating. He envisions a broad range of people benefitting from the platform, including those who might just be looking to create something to share with their children, or young people looking to gain experience crafting and sharing their own visual stories.

“The creators that we’re enabling, we are really opening that funnel up,” he says.