“Excited for Merse to launch: Netflix for audio-visual comics, where you can hear character voices and sounds.”
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“@markrachapoom and @kumareth have made modern comics for the digital age, and it’s super cool.”
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Co-Founder & CTO // YC S24
In the Summer of 2024, on a 3 a.m. walk at Stanford, I partnered with my colleague of 4+ years ⸺ Mark Rachapoom, to create an Audio-Visual Comic Company called Merse. We were accepted into Y Combinator. We quickly scaled it to 25K monthly active readers featuring wide range of comics. For this work, we were featured in Business Insider.
Our tools helped artists create, publish, and monetize comics, with text and voice translation into six languages. We introduced it as “the Netflix for audio-visual comics”.
All the stories we consume are mostly passive. We sit, we read, watch and scroll over stories all while having no say in the said stories. We were building world's first-ever Active Content Consumption Engine. This means, you could shape the future of stories on Merse. This was not a simple "choose your option" roleplay game, but we generated live audio-visual effects for a future that was written live after every custom action players take (by speaking into the story what their character does).
This was a very novel and ahead of curve idea at the time as AI models weren't equipped to do good quality audio story inference with consistent characters.
We made the first public attempt at solving prompt-based character-consistency (a very known AI image gen issue) in 2024.
Merse in Times Square
In the press
Business InsiderRead more
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Wall of love
A launch-day note from Aaron Epstein at Y Combinator, and Naval Ravikant’s reaction on Airchat.
“This is really amazing. Kudos. If we can somehow embed this inside Airchat, we would love to.”Open video