Internet company Naver has agreed to acquire Wattpad, a Canada-based written content sharing platform backed by corporate investors Bennett Coleman & Co, Globe Telecom and Tencent, for more than $600m.
Founded in 2006, Wattpad has built an online community with more than 160 million monthly users that allows members to upload and distribute written works of fiction. The platform hosts some 350,000 original stories.
The cash-and-stock deal will involve the company merging with Naver’s digital comic distributor subsidiary, Webtoon, combining visual and textual features into a shared framework. Wattpad will leverage Webtoon’s established monetisation scheme to support its writers.
Wattpad had most recently closed an early 2019 round of undisclosed size featuring Times Bridge, a corporate venturing arm of media group Bennett Coleman & Co.
The company had raised $51m the year before from telecommunications firm Globe Telecom’s Kickstart Ventures unit, internet group Tencent, merchant bank Raine, Peterson Group and Business Development Bank of Canada at a reported $398m valuation.
Raine Ventures had already participated in a series C round for Wattpad in 2014 that was led by Omers Ventures and which included August Capital and Northleaf Capital Partners.
Omers Ventures had previously joined Golden Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Union Square Ventures, W Media Ventures and multiple individual investors to provide $20.8m for Wattpad across two rounds in 2011 and 2012.
Naver Webtoon founder and chief executive Jun Koo Kim said: “Wattpad joining Webtoon under the Naver umbrella will be a big step towards us becoming a leading global multimedia entertainment company.
“Both Wattpad and Webtoon care most about helping creators tell their story their way, and both represent world-leading collections of inspired, imaginative storytelling [intellectual property].”
