LionRocket Secures funding from CJ Investment for Innovative AI Webtoon Technology
Korean image-generating AI startup LionRocket has secured investment from CJ Investment. LionRocket, known for its involvement in the ‘AI Lee Hyun-se’ project, attracted this follow-up investment after raising KRW 6 billion in a bridge round last December, thanks to its proprietary image-generating AI technology, Brain Boosting Learning.
CJ Investment stated that the investment was made recognizing LionRocket’s potential and market fit with its image-generating AI technology. With this new funding, LionRocket aims to enhance its technology as the leading image-generating AI company. Moreover, the company plans to expand its business and strengthen its position in the global AI webtoon market, including entry into Japan.
Renowned for the ‘AI Lee Hyun-se Project,’ Lion Rocket is pioneering a paradigm shift in the content market with its image-generating AI technology, under the slogan “Meet beloved stories faster-” The company is currently collaborating with over 15 content companies in Korea and Japan, leveraging its unique image-generating AI technology. Lion Rocket has trained its AI on comics by artist Lee Hyun-se and plans to release ‘Dawn of Charon’ in the first half of this year, showcasing about 80 cuts per episode.
Lion Rocket’s AI webtoon production service, Genvas, offers webtoon production that is ten times faster and 50% cheaper, thanks to its proprietary character fixation and motion control technology. Using its unique learning algorithm, Genvas can create high-quality characters from just 10 training images, and its pose control technology can improve webtoon productivity by over 90%.
Traditional image-generating AI technologies like Stable Diffusion and MidJourney, which represent large image models, were advantageous for creating one-off images but faced challenges in producing consistent, sequential characters for webtoons, limiting their practical use.
Lion Rocket’s Brain Boosting Learning technology, which is key in webtoon applications, excels in ‘control,’ enabling consistent character representation with just 10 training data images. The company avoids training data copyright issues by training on the styles of contracted artists and using them exclusively for their series.
Ji-eun Park, Head of CJ Investment, emphasized, “While applying generative AI to industries remains challenging, Lion Rocket has demonstrated excellent technology and a clear market fit, prompting our investment. We anticipate that this investment will underpin Lion Rocket’s technological innovation and ongoing growth.”
Seunghwan Jung, CEO of Lion Rocket, stated, “As a partner enabling everyone to access captivating stories more quickly through generative AI technology, we have focused on addressing the various challenges in the webtoon production market. We will continue to support the growth of the webtoon market as a reliable and definitive partner with Genvas’s unique image-generating AI technology.”
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