British children's stories startup Lost My Name tells a $9m funding tale

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/25/lost-my-name-funding-google-ventures

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Children’s storytelling startup Lost My Name raised its first $100k of funding in 2014 on TV show Dragon’s Den. Now the London-based firm is turning to Silicon Valley for a $9m funding round.

The investment – led by Google Ventures with venture capital firms Greycroft and The Chernin Group also participating – follows more than 600k sales of Lost My Name’s first personalised picture-book since its launch two years ago.

Parents order the book directly from the company’s website, entering their child’s name to customise its storyline – which sees the hero or heroine collecting the letters of the chosen name while meeting a host of characters.

Lost My Name is planning to expand its business globally, while launching a second book in the autumn with a space theme. The company is also exploring the idea of launching stories digitally as apps and animation, as well as physical products.

“As a London-based startup with global ambitions we were keen to raise in the USA and connect to the networks and talent of the hugely important US market,” said co-founder Asi Sharabi in a statement.

Sharabi was one of the “three fathers and an uncle” who founded Lost My Name in 2012, before securing $100k from investor Piers Linney on the Dragon’s Den TV show the following year.

“We want to combine the power of stories with the possibilities of technology. There is tons of technology behind every book that we create, but it’s technology that always stays in the background,” Sharabi told the Guardian ahead of the funding announcement.

“It is technology that still allows this quiet, old-fashioned bonding moment between the parent and the child as they read together, rather than the shouty bells and whistles of apps and screens. We think that books are here to stay: they’re not going to go anywhere.”

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The company describes itself as a “full-stack” technology startup rather than a book publisher: it creates the stories and illustrations in-house, but also the technology to customise the £18.99 books and order them online, as well as handling the printing, distribution and marketing.

It’s that aspect that attracted the Silicon Valley investors. Greycroft founding partner Dana Settle praised Lost My Name’s “unique hybrid between content, commerce and service”, while Google Ventures’ Avid Larizadeh Duggan claimed that “the move toward customised content changes the way kids interact with books, video and toys”.

“We only exist online: you cannot find us in any shops. We’re a proper e-commerce business. And we learned earlier this year that in 2014 we were the top-selling picture book in the UK,” Sharabi told the Guardian.

“Julia Donaldson, who dominates that market, sold 112k copies of her Superworm book in the UK last year. We did 132k in the UK, and 325k books in total globally. We’re not in the official sales charts, because we don’t have an ISBN, but that gives you a picture of how we performed.”