Orange

Orange Inc. is a Japanese startup founded in 2021 by CEO Shoko Ugaki with the mission of making manga globally accessible. Ugaki, a lifelong manga enthusiast with a personal collection of over 10,000 volumes, previously served as the youngest division head at mobile game developer COLOPL before founding Orange. He was joined in 2023 by COO and Board Director Hiroshi Hasegawa, who brought experience from Sumitomo Corporation and Boston Consulting Group.

The company addresses a significant bottleneck in the manga industry, where only an estimated 2% of titles published in Japan are officially translated into English. This gap has fueled a large market for pirated content. To tackle this, Orange has developed a proprietary AI-assisted localization system. This technology leverages deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to automate significant parts of the translation, typesetting, and lettering process, which aims to dramatically increase the volume and speed of manga localization. While AI provides the initial drafts and handles technical aspects, the company emphasizes a human-led workflow, where every page is reviewed and refined by in-house professional translators, editors, and letterers to ensure cultural nuance and artistic integrity.

Orange's business model operates on two main fronts. First, its in-house localization team, "Studio," produces translated manga. Second, the company retails digital manga through its own platform, "emaqi," which launched in North America in the summer of 2024. The emaqi store distributes both manga localized by Orange and finished English editions supplied directly by other major rights-holders and publishers, such as VIZ Media, Kodansha USA, and Yen Press. This digital storefront, whose name derives from traditional Japanese picture scrolls, aims to combat piracy by providing legal access to a wider variety of titles, including many previously unavailable in English.

The company's goal is to increase the output of officially localized manga from around 100 volumes per month to over 500, with a long-term vision of translating 50,000 titles in five years. Orange secured approximately $19.5 million in a pre-Series A financing round in 2024, with investments from major players like publisher Shogakukan and Globis Capital Partners, to fund its expansion and the launch of emaqi.

Keywords: manga localization, AI translation, digital manga, computer vision, natural language processing, Japanese content, publishing technology, digital comics, machine learning, Shoko Ugaki, emaqi, manga platform, translation services, content distribution, anime industry, entertainment technology, language technology, visual content processing, AI-assisted workflow, digital publishing