Continued from Part 1

The recently announced multiyear deal with Dhar Mann Studios is set to deliver an initial slate of 40 narrative-driven vertical titles for My Drama while Dhar Mann retains ownership and creative control. What made this collaboration attractive for HOLYWATER TECH, and how does it fit into your global content strategy?

Bogdan Nesvit: At HOLYWATER TECH, our mission is to unlock creators’ potential and help them reach global audiences through new, mobile-first storytelling formats. That’s exactly why the collaboration with Dhar Mann Studios was such a natural fit. Dhar Mann is one of the most influential digital storytellers today, recognized by Forbes as the 2 Top Creator in 2024 and 2025 and named to the inaugural TIME100 Creators list in 2025.

This partnership also builds on the strategic foundation we established earlier with FOX Entertainment. That relationship is already attracting top-tier studios and creators like Dhar Mann, who benefit from FOX’s deep content expertise, access to talent, and production resources, combined with HOLYWATER TECH’s data, audience insights, IP incubation, and distribution engine.

More broadly, this signals a key shift in the market: leading creators are entering vertical storytelling and bringing their loyal audiences with them. That’s a major step toward turning what was once a niche format into mainstream entertainment in the U.S., which has been our goal from the start. Like the FOX partnership and our recent investment round, this deal marks an important milestone for the vertical video industry outside of China.


Dhar Mann’s audience spans more than 160 million followers globally. How are you approaching the creative and business balance between his style of storytelling and HOLYWATER TECH’s existing vertical narrative formats?

Bogdan Nesvit: It’s very important for us to celebrate each creator’s artistic style, and that’s especially true when working with someone like Dhar Mann, whose storytelling voice resonates with more than 160 million followers worldwide.

At the same time, HOLYWATER TECH acts as a technology and distribution partner, providing a system that allows stories to be tested early and quickly distributed to global audiences in a vertical, mobile-first format. We also share our vertical playbook and deep user insights to help creators understand what scales within our ecosystem and beyond.

Combined with Dhar Mann’s creative strengths and the production expertise supported by FOX, this creates a strong synergy—one that allows his stories to evolve further while reaching new audiences through vertical storytelling.


HOLYWATER TECH also recently closed a $22 million funding round led by Horizon Capital with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and Wheelhouse, described as one of the largest in the vertical video/microdrama sector outside Asia. What specific growth initiatives will this funding enable?

Anatolii Kasianov: HOLYWATER TECH plans to deploy the newly raised $22 million with a strong focus on platform leverage rather than brute-force scaling. The investment is aimed at strengthening the systems that allow the company to operate faster, smarter, and at greater scale. Specifically:

1/ Technology & IP discovery: expanding recommendation systems, analytics, and AI-driven IP discovery to shorten the feedback loop between audience demand and content creation.

2/ AI-native production pipelines: scaling AI-assisted production across vertical video, books, AI-generated series, and new formats such as comics and anime, enabling the release of 120–200 series per year without sacrificing quality.

3/ Market expansion & partnerships: deepening partnerships—especially in the U.S.—with studios, creators, and premium partners to establish vertical series as a mainstream entertainment format.


Part of the investment strategy is to scale AI-driven content tools and expand into formats like AI comics and anime alongside vertical video. How do you see the role of AI shaping the future of storytelling at HOLYWATER TECH?

Anatolii Kasianov: To answer this question, I’d like to explain how AI is incorporated now, and what other plans we have for it in the future.

HOLYWATER TECH is an AI-first entertainment company that pairs creators’ imagination with AI efficiency to bring stories to life and deliver them to global audiences. AI is deeply embedded in our workflows to automate repetitive processes, speed up iteration, and improve scale, while all core creative decisions remain led by human creators.

Today, HOLYWATER TECH’s ecosystem reaches 85 million users and includes My Passion (digital publishing and IP discovery), My Muse (AI-generated video storytelling), and My Drama (live-action vertical streaming). Together, they form a fluid, multi-format content pipeline.

AI delivers the most immediate impact in adaptation—moving stories from books to scripts to video—and in production and post-production, where data, automation, and tooling allow us to create content up to 10× faster and at a fraction of traditional costs. On My Drama, AI is primarily used in post-production and localization to efficiently scale content across markets. On My Passion, writers use AI to streamline research, planning, and drafting, while maintaining full creative control. My Muse sits at the center of experimentation, where AI enables rapid visual iteration, storyboarding, and format testing.

Overall, AI acts as a force multiplier across the pipeline—enhancing speed, scale, and learning—while creativity, narrative direction, and taste remain human-driven, as it should be.


With strong engagement metrics and award recognition for My Drama, how do you measure success in the vertical video format versus traditional long-form television or streaming content?

Sasha Tkachenko: We measure success in vertical video differently than in traditional long-form TV or streaming, because the viewer behavior and consumption context is diverse. In vertical storytelling, success starts with engagement density — how quickly a story hooks viewers, how consistently they return episode after episode, and how deeply they progress through a series in short sessions.

Beyond raw views, we focus on metrics like completion rates, episodes watched per user, retention across story arcs, and speed to validation — how fast a concept proves demand. That allows us to iterate and scale stories much earlier than in long-form production cycles.

At the same time, awards and critical recognition matter because they signal that vertical series can deliver not just engagement, but quality storytelling. Ultimately, we don’t see vertical and long-form as competing formats — they serve different moments and audiences. Our goal is to build vertical storytelling as a mainstream format with its own success benchmarks, optimized for mobile-first consumption.