Wattpad

Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen started Wattpad in Toronto in 2006, a year before the iPhone and a year before the Kindle, on a bet that people would read on the devices they already carried and that mobile internet would let the content come down from the cloud. The third piece was user-generated content: not publishers deciding what gets published, but readers and writers. Fifteen years later it was a platform where roughly 100 million monthly users read and share stories, five million of them writers posting a million new chapters a day in 50 languages. The data underneath that became a second business — Wattpad picks its best-performing stories and turns them into print books (Wattpad Books, launched January 2019), TV shows, and films, co-producing with Netflix, Disney, and others. Lau raised about US$120M across rounds led by Union Square Ventures and Golden Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and Tencent, and did it without moving to Silicon Valley — a refusal he has since made a point of. In January 2021 Naver, the South Korean internet conglomerate behind WEBTOON, agreed to buy the company; the deal closed in May 2021. Lau put the price at US$660M on stage; Naver's announcement described a cash-and-stock deal valued at more than US$600M (about CAD$754M), one of the largest Canadian tech exits to that point. Wattpad stayed headquartered in Toronto and is now a subsidiary of WEBTOON Entertainment. Lau stepped down as CEO in May 2022.