Igor Matsanyuk, a prominent figure in the Russian Internet and online game industry, and now the owner of Imi.vc, a Russian venture capital firm that funds innovative mobile apps, has invested $4 million in Narr8, Russian IT portal CNews.ru reported last week.
Founded by former Mail.ru VP Alexander Vashchenko, Narr8 is a producer of comic book-based image series for tablets. The company is developing a special application which enables users to download both still and animated image series (stories), with or without special effects, from a variety of genres including fantasy, horror, lifestyle, comics, popular scientific literature, and others.
Narr8 told CNews.ru both the application and productions will be free; the company’s monetization strategy, however, is built around a comics aficionado’s natural inclination to watch his favorite series almost non-stop. Each part will end at a critical and gripping moment. To find out immediately what happens next, users will need to pay – or otherwise wait to weeks to see the continuation of the content free of charge.
Another way Narr8 makes money is through product placements to appear in short popular scientific stories.
The comics developer is gearing up for an October release of its iPad-compatible app in Russia and the United States. The company plans to come up with an Android-powered tablet adaptation later on.
Narr8 is a 100-strong company with offices in Russia and the U.S. (San Francisco), running eight production studios that create content in both Russian and English.
