South Korean AI company Wrtn Technologies has closed a Series C funding round of roughly 100 billion won (about $72.2 million), pushing its valuation past 1 trillion won (over $722 million) and making it the first Korean AI service startup to cross that threshold — a milestone underscored by an AI entertainment app that went from launch to $7.2 million in monthly revenue in just three months.
The round, announced Wednesday, brought in new investors Coreline Ventures and Eugene Asset Management alongside existing backers Goodwater Capital, Antler, the Korea Development Bank and Capstone. It lifts Wrtn's total funding raised since its 2021 founding to approximately 230 billion won, or about $166 million. Coreline Ventures, a U.S. venture firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Tokyo whose portfolio includes Kakao and Happy Elements, led the new-money side of the round.
"For the past five years since our founding, we have established ourselves as Korea's leading AI service company and demonstrated our global competitiveness, which enabled us to successfully complete this funding round," Wrtn CEO Lee Se-young said in a statement announcing the raise. "We will focus on global expansion and further advance our services to meet market expectations, while accelerating our growth as a provider of safe and trustworthy AI services."
Osuke Honda, co-founder and managing partner of Coreline Ventures, said Wrtn is quickly becoming "a global phenomenon," pointing to the company's rapid growth and monetization along with the ecosystem impact it is already generating across Korea, Japan and the United States as a rare combination, and adding that his firm has strong confidence in Wrtn's team and its growth potential.
The OOC breakout
The financial headline sits on top of a specific product story. Wrtn's AI entertainment platform OOC — an interactive storytelling app marketed as "The Playable Anime" — launched in North America in May and surpassed 10 billion won (about $7.2 million) in monthly revenue within three months, with overseas sales already exceeding domestic sales. That performance, layered on top of Wrtn's existing character-chat platform Crack and its free-access hub to models like GPT, Claude and Gemini, is why the company now expects total 2026 revenue to top 200 billion won — more than four times the 47.1 billion won it generated in 2025.
Wrtn has positioned its story-driven format as a deliberate alternative to companion-chatbot rivals such as Character.AI. Founder Lee told Reuters earlier this year that the company's narrative-first design, in which AI-generated characters can disappear or be replaced as a story unfolds, is meant to sidestep some of the dependency concerns dogging companion apps. "Users aren't just chatting with a character; they are entering a narrative world where they are the protagonist," Lee said, describing a system that generates novels, images and audio in real time based on user choices. Wrtn has said average users spend roughly two hours a day on the platform — comparable to time spent on Netflix or YouTube — with paying-user retention above 70%.
The company is also trying to get ahead of regulatory scrutiny facing AI companion and chatbot products broadly. In July, Wrtn launched a user committee stocked with experts in AI ethics, philosophy and law, and it is working with the Korea Internet Self-Governance Organization to draft self-regulatory guidelines for AI character chatbot services. Lee has previously said Wrtn is targeting roughly $700 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2027 and is eyeing a possible IPO as early as 2028, in either South Korea or the United States.
Why It Matters
Wrtn's raise lands at a moment when investors are increasingly willing to write large checks for consumer-facing AI entertainment and companionship products, not just enterprise productivity tools. A Korean startup crossing a $722 million valuation on the strength of an anime-styled storytelling app — with overseas revenue now outpacing its home market within months of a U.S. launch — is a concrete data point in the broader thesis that "AI entertainment" is a durable, monetizable category rather than a novelty. It also signals that Asian AI startups are increasingly building for global, not just domestic, audiences from day one, using regional funding (Korean venture capital, a Korean development bank) to bankroll expansion into the U.S. market.
At the same time, the sector remains under a cloud. Character-based AI chat products have faced sustained criticism over user dependency and blurred lines between generated interactions and real relationships, and regulators in multiple countries are tightening rules around AI companion services aimed at younger users. Wrtn's emphasis on narrative structure — and its move to stand up an ethics committee and pursue self-regulatory guidelines — reads as an attempt to differentiate itself commercially while getting ahead of the compliance risk other companion-AI players are now confronting.
What to Watch
Watch whether Wrtn's U.S. growth trajectory holds up as OOC scales past its early three-month numbers, and whether the company can sustain overseas revenue outpacing domestic sales as it broadens beyond North America. Also worth tracking: how regulators in South Korea, Japan and the U.S. treat AI character and companion products over the next year, since Wrtn's self-regulatory push could become a template — or a cautionary tale — for competitors as the company moves toward its stated 2028 IPO target.
“For the past five years since our founding, we have established ourselves as Korea's leading AI service company and demonstrated our global competitiveness, which enabled us to successfully complete this funding round.”— Lee Se-young, CEO, Wrtn Technologies