Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If there's anyone who knows more than anyone about losing control of your narrative, it's him. Now, Kaepernick is launching Lumi, an AI storytelling platform that helps creators tell and own their own stories.
If you're reading this and thinking, “Huh?”, that's understandable. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise in this field than you might think. First, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is just a tool to get there. Kaepernick has spent the last decade building a media company, Kaepernick Media, which has exposed him to some of the media industry's deepest problems. He's also served on Medium's board of directors since 2020. Lumi seeks to address issues like gatekeeping, production costs, and creators losing ownership of their work. While the solution isn't revolutionary (AI subscriptions, distribution platforms, revenue-sharing plans), the implementation may be.
Kaepernick made headlines during the 2016 NFL season, not for his passing success rate, but for kneeling during the national anthem before games. Although it was a protest against civil injustice against black people, many took his kneeling as disrespectful. At the time, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he “didn't necessarily agree with his actions,” and others, including former President Trump, said much worse. After Kaepernick left the 49ers, he struggled to get a place with another team, despite leading San Francisco to the Super Bowl a few years earlier, sparking suspicions that he was being shut out by NFL owners.
“Why should I do that, about my own story – the impact and the meaning of other people creating a story around it and telling it from their perspective,” Kapernick told TechCrunch in an interview. “In the past, there have been times where I could have jumped out and told my story in a different way, but I try to be thoughtful about how I structure things and why I'm doing them. If it's just self-interested or self-indulgent, I'm not particularly interested.”
But with Rumi, Kapernick sees an opportunity to empower storytellers more broadly. He may publish stories on the platform himself, but that's not the point. Kapernick's struggles with the media industry have had a major impact on his own life, but he's now using those lessons to create solutions that are bigger than himself.
Lumi emerged from stealth on Wednesday with a $4 million seed round led by Seven Seven Six. The company also today allowed creators to sign up for a beta version.
Great! So what?
Kapernick wants Lumi to become an end-to-end media company that eventually expands into video, offering creator tools, a distribution platform, and publishing and merchandising services. For now, Lumi is starting small, with creator tools for illustrators who draw Japanese-style manga.
The first step in storytelling with Lumi is for creators to visit the website, where they can create their story's protagonist by describing his or her backstory, physical characteristics, and other traits into a text-based AI model. This will generate an AI image of the character that illustrators can use as inspiration or build their story using the actual character image.
Lumi's AI then helps you plan your story by asking questions about story structure, protagonists and antagonists, and themes, and helps you write a script. You're then presented with the final product page, where all the images, dialogue, and captions are formatted into a graphic novel. You can then publish your story, and a digital version will be made available on the front end of Lumi's website.
But Lumi also wants to make physical publishing and merchandising easier for creators: Kapernick said the company will handle all the business logistics so creators can focus on storytelling, making Lumi a one-stop shop for all of their needs.
Creators can choose from three monthly subscription tiers ($20, $40 and $75), with the higher tiers unlocking more advanced creator features, and Kapernick hopes to share revenue from those articles, physical copies and merchandising with them.
Kapernick's plan centers around making Lumi an entertainment platform for manga fans, and while there's some value in putting stories on the Lumi website, it only works if people visit the site.
Familiar with Silicon Valley
While Lumi is the first startup Kapernick has founded, the former quarterback has been an angel investor since 2017, telling TechCrunch he has made more than 50 investments to date. Kapernick has also served as a board member at digital publishing platform Medium since 2020. There, he worked with some of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors, including a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Medium co-founder Evan Williams and Heretic Ventures founder Mariam Nafisi, who Kapernick said honed his business acumen as a tech founder.
“I don't think we suddenly decided one day, 'Hey, let's build a technology company,'” Kapernick said, “but we were trying to solve this problem for the creators we were engaging with, and it just so happened that the best way for us to do this was to build a technology company.”
While some Silicon Valley leaders have openly supported Trump, Kapernick said he isn't worried about entering Silicon Valley more publicly as a founder during this politically charged time. Kapernick has been a civil rights activist for nearly a decade and has led Know Your Rights Camp since 2016, whose mission is to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.” When it comes to Lumi, Kapernick says he's solely focused on the product.
“I have no qualms about entering this industry at this time,” Kapernick said. “My belief is that if we can provide the best possible service to the end user and the creator, the company will be successful and everything else will fall into place.”
Lumi aims to elevate voices that are currently underrepresented, and Kapernick's business uses a few different underlying AI models, but he's keen to address the bias that has plagued LLM for years.
“Current AI models have historical biases built into them. We've seen it, we know it,” Kapernick says. “When we think about stories and how people are represented, AI is going to exponentially accelerate things, and that can be exponentially better or worse. Our hope is to build something that paves the way for a better path forward for storytellers and creators.”