Serialized Fiction App Radish Raises $3 Million From UTA, Author Amy Tan, Others

Radish, a mobile app that enables writers to monetize their short-form, serialized fiction through micropayments, announced today a $3 million seed round. Leading the investment were Greylock, Lowercase Capital, Softbank‘s Next Media Innovation Fund, UTA, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, and Sherpa Capital.

Radish also received funding from author Amy Tan, ITV chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette, former Microsoft exec Charlie Songhurst, and others. Larry Kirshbaum, a former top Amazon and Time Warner Book Group exec, will serve as a senior adviser to Radish, and Tinder’s VP of product, Ankur Jain, will join its board.

Radish launched last February and today counts 700 authors in myriad genres, the company said, as well as hundreds of thousands of app downloads to date. Its top writer earns $13,000 per month. The app functions on a freemium model whereby users can read the initial installments of a serialized work for free, and then make micropayments to access subsequent chapters. Authors retain copyright to their works, and can publish or adapt them later in other formats.

In this respect, Radish is different from competing fiction platform Wattpad, which serves works for free but seeks to help authors monetize via advertising, branded content, or production deals.

“Radish takes serialized storytelling into the 21st century, making it possible for the next Charles Dickens to reach and monetize tales suitable for today’s mobile audience,” said the company’s founder and CEO Seung-Yoon Lee. “Similar so-called freemium micropayment models have already won huge audiences in my home country South Korea, Japan, and China.” In China, he says, some writers are making several million dollars per year.

Sam Wick, head of UTA Ventures, noted that the authors on Radish have “strong followings” that could then be harnessed for other entertainment media ventures.