Thai/Japanese Kickstarter Anipipo partners with Thai Cartoon Club to broadcast animation throughout SEA

The winner of Khun Seuk VS Samurai: The Second Thai-Japanese X-Culture Startup Pitching, an event by SIPA, Software Park, and Microsoft, Anipipo is an Animation-focused crowdfunding site.

At the pitching event, Anipipo competed with other strong competitors such as Noonswoon (a recent AIS Startup Weekends Winner), StockSquare Radar, AttackPrice, SchoolDirect, Gotcha app from Thailand, and AppDriver from Japan. Winning this competition means Anipipo must have some strong secret weapons in its pocket.

The project beta launched in Japan on May 23, 2013. Anipipo is a partnership between three co-founders from Hiroaki Taira (from Japan), Sam Tiyavutiroj, and Vincent Sethiwan, the folks who run Launchpad, a famous co-working space in Bangkok.

All of Anipipo’s development and design happens in Thailand, while the Japanese side works on the promotion, sales, finance, and other management.

The new ecosystem

Anipipo sees that nowadays, animator’s tools have been digitized, but their promotion is still mainly word of mouth. Anipipo’s next step is to be a distribution channel for animation works.

The company believes that sometimes, 2D/3D artists just want to create and have a place to show off their work. They fund themselves to create, but they want a platform to display their efforts. With an exclusive partnership with Cartoon Club Thailand, the company that owns Modern 9 Cartoon, any projects that get funded or any people with certified projects through Anipipo will be guaranteed broadcasting time in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos through cable and satellite. The team is also working to push the project from Thailand to other countries, as well. The broadcasting is planned to start in the last quarter of this year.

In the end, Anipipo wants to recreate the animation ecosystem from funding, creation, distribution, and sales. Now, an animator must go to separate companies to fund, distribute, and sell his or her work.

In the future, the team believes that if it gets enough traffic, the content broadcasters will buy content from Anipipo for their channels. Anipipo will be the middleman holding the licenses. After that, it wants to get to the point that Anipipo can become a content provider.

Anipipo’s numbers

Tech in Asia talked to Anipipo in June this year. Back then, the site listed four projects and had crowdfunded over ¥600,000 ($6,100) so far. It mentioned the goal this year was to fund over $500,000. The latest news from the company is that the site now has 575 registered user. Its KPI for success is the percentage of people who pledge to help the project. The number right now is at  70 percent of site visitors. The pledges the site gets right now are from all over the world – not just Japan. They come from Europe, Brazil, and the US.

The first case was a big success. The site collected over ¥5.3 million ($55,000). Three projects expired and there are two ongoing projects on the site now.

Anipipo was funded by Samurai Incubate for ¥5 million ($50,000). The team is also working on the next round of fundraising from some other investors to expand the team and stabilize the platform.

Anipipo is available in English and Japanese right now. In the next phase, the company plans to add a third language, Thai, and also develop a mobile site and apps in the future.

(Editing by Paul Bischoff)