• by Colin Kirkland , July 24, 2024

Former NFL quarterback, author and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick is launching Lumi, a budding media company aimed at guiding creators through the process of publishing original stories in the form of comic books, graphic novels and manga with the help of creative AI tools. 

“Our focus is on democratizing storytelling,” Kaepernick said in a recent statement, adding that Lumi -- which is currently available in beta form -- is starting small but will eventually venture into video creation, offering creator tools and a distribution platform, as well as publishing and merchandising services.

The AI tools included in the platform are designed to flesh out characters both conceptually and visually, as well as to draft and edit dialogue and text and create full images to accompany the written work.

Creators using Lumi can publish and sell their creations directly on the platform in both physical and digital form. 

“AI models as they exist today, they’re going to have the biases of the past built into them. We’ve seen that -- we know that,” Kaepernick told Tech Crunch. “When we think about narratives and how people are represented, AI is going to accelerate things exponentially. That can be both exponentially good and bad. Our hope here is that we build something to create that better path forward for storytellers and creators.

Kaepernick’s decision to head an AI-driven creator publishing platform builds on the entrepreneur’s past endeavors such as writing a graphic novel, founding his own publishing company, Kaepernick Publishing, and serving on the board of digital publishing company Medium since 2020. 

Having navigated the publishing industry, as well as various creator spaces, Kaepernick wants Lumi to simplify the business behind publishing -- effectively becoming a driver in enabling stories to be told that might otherwise go unnoticed, while addressing gatekeeping and ownership issues, as well as unnecessary production costs.

“We’ll handle all the logistics behind the scenes,” says Kaepernick. “One of the things that we’ve found is that creators love creating, and they want to focus on creating. Most of them do not want to be business operators.” 

So far, Lumi has received $4 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.

The platform will offer users three subscription tiers that allow access to different AI tools and breakdowns on how much Lumi will take from book and merchandise sales. Regardless of which tier creators select, they are promised full rights to their work, giving them the freedom to publish or sell somewhere else post-creation.