Pitch Deck: Dstlry Raises $5M for New Comic Book Startup

Mosher and Steinberger have lived and breathed comics for more than a decade. Steinberger co-founded comics platform Comixology in 2007, where Mosher would later serve as chief content officer. The two joined Amazon in 2014 after it acquired the upstart, helping to shape the tech giant’s digital comics experience and manga content.

That background gave the pair a head start when it came time to raise funds for Dstlry, Steinberger told Business Insider.

“In seed funding, I think investors put as much value on the people as the idea,” he said. “Selling a company to Amazon is a proof point. Running comics worldwide there is a proof point.”

The company’s recent round was led by 1AM Gaming. Other investors include publishers Kodansha and Delcourt, the former Warner Bros. executive. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, tech investor Mike Vorhaus and video game veteran John Schappert.

Even with strong backgrounds in comics, the fundraising environment has been “strange,” Steinberger said, especially given how much artificial intelligence has infiltrated VCs’ imaginations.

Dstlry’s story for investors has rooted its content and relationships with human creators. It is a media publisher that operates a marketplace with some Web3 components that allow it to verify ownership. But it’s purpose-built to not feel like a platform for NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. “The fun of digital collecting without the blockchain BS,” the company wrote on its website.

The company bets on original, human-created content and uses technology to bring this to the fore. For example, it recently added the ability for creators to digitally sign and sketch new comic book editions.

“I think more and more man-made items and artifacts will be of value,” he said. “I kind of swam against the trends.”

In the 36-page presentation to investors, the company highlighted the experience of its co-founders, outlined how its platform helps creators and customers, touted the success of Dstlry’s three published projects in 2023, and teased how it plans to expand the business.

BI publishes 26 key slides, excluding some with repeated or redacted information, such as Dstlry valuation, run rate and proprietary business plans.

In the presentation, the co-founders said they preferred to have fewer words on the slides because they believed it was better to describe something to investors than have them read from a slide.

“We spent a lot of time on deck trying to really hone the storytelling,” Steinberger said. “Obviously, we love comics, and comics have an economy of storytelling, and we wanted the package to reflect the fun of the industry we work in.”