Just curious. How does copyright work? Do you guys pay some money to mangaka so you can have their manga streamed on your website?

Hey there, I’m Abbas Jaffery, co-founder and CEO of Azuki: Your Digital Manga Cafe. We’re a subscription service for reading digital manga (Japanese comics) on Web, iOS, and Android. With Azuki you can easily read official translations of the latest chapters or dive into our back catalog of hit manga and hidden gems. We’re also a member of the Winter 2022 batch at Y Combinator! We’re in the middle of a golden age of manga. More and more series are getting translated and released in English, but even so, publishers can’t keep up with fans’ hunger for new manga. Print shortages due to COVID-19 and the long production pipeline of print books mean that lots of series take months or years to get official releases in English. Our team members are big manga fans, and wanted an easy way to follow new series without filling up our bookshelves or tracking down and paying for thousands of individual ebooks. Most of us met while working at the anime streaming site Crunchyroll, and we decided we could put that experience to work building the kind of manga app we wanted to see. That led to Azuki, a manga service that makes it easier than ever to stay up to date on the latest chapters as soon as they come out in Japan. For a single subscription fee ($4.99/month), you get unlimited access to high-quality official translations of new chapters from more than 20 ongoing series including EDENS ZERO, The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse, and The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting. Most new chapters are available in English at the same time as they go on sale in Japan! Plus we have a huge back catalog, including hit series like Attack on Titan and Fairy Tail, and acclaimed indie manga like Pop Life and Children of Mu-Town. All of this is available to read in our apps on Web, iOS, and Android, with series progress and reading lists shared across the apps. Fans love us compared to other manga reader options because of the easy access to the latest chapters (no need to buy individual ebooks for each one), our diverse catalog featuring series from six different publishers, and our dedication to presenting manga pages in the highest possible quality. I’d love for you to give Azuki a try! Most series have the first few chapters available for free right now (with ads), and there’s a 30-day free trial so you can try our Premium membership before you pay anything. I seriously appreciate any feedback you have about the service and how we can improve. Thank you!

This is such a great team tackling a very interesting problem! I was a Naruto fan growing up and would have loved this type of service.