Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs | TechCrunch

Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories.

If you said, “Huh?” when reading that, I wouldn’t blame you. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise here than you might realize. First off, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is merely a tool to get there. Kaepernick spent the last 10 years building a media company, Kaepernick Media, which exposed him to some of the media industry’s deeply entrenched problems. He’s also served on Medium’s board since 2020. Lumi attempts to address issues like gatekeeping, production costs, and creatives losing ownership of their work. The solution is not revolutionary — an AI subscription, a distribution platform, and a revenue share plan — but the implementation might be.

Kaepernick made headlines during the 2016 NFL season, not for his passer rating, but for kneeling during the national anthem before football games. It was a protest to civil injustices against Black people, but many took his kneel to be disrespectful. At the time, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “I don’t necessarily agree with what he’s doing,” while others, including former President Trump, said worse. After leaving the 49ers, Kaepernick struggled to land with another team despite leading San Francisco to a Super Bowl a few years earlier, leading to suspicions he’d been blackballed by NFL owners.

“On my own story — the impact and implications of other people creating their narratives around it and telling it from their perspective — why should that be the case?” said Kaepernick in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are times in the past where I could have jumped out and told my story in different ways, but I try to be thoughtful of how I’m building things and why I’m doing them. If it’s something that is just self-interested or self-fulfilling, that doesn’t particularly interest me.”

But with Lumi, Kaepernick sees an opportunity to empower storytellers more broadly. He may release a story on the platform himself, but that’s not quite the point. Kaepernick’s difficulties with the media industry have greatly impacted his own life, but now he’s using the lesson to create a solution larger than himself.

On Wednesday, Lumi is emerging from stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by Seven Seven Six. The company is also allowing creators to sign up for its beta version today.

Cool! So what is it?

Kaepernick ultimately sees Lumi as an end-to-end media company — venturing into video eventually — offering creator tools, a distribution platform, publishing and merchandising services. For now, Lumi is starting small with creator tools for comic book illustrators, specifically the Japanese style, manga.

The first thing creators do when storytelling with Lumi is visit the website. There, you can create your story’s main character by describing their backstory, physical characteristics, and other traits into a text-based AI model. That leads to an AI image generation of your character, which illustrators could use as inspiration or the actual character imagery to build a story around.

Then Lumi’s AI helps you plan out your story, asking questions about story structure, protagonists and antagonists, and themes and helping to generate a script. Then you’ll get to the final product page, where all the imagery, dialogue and captions are formatted into a graphic novel. You can then publish your story and a digital version will go live on the front end of Lumi’s website.

But Lumi also wants to make physical publishing and merchandising easier for creators. Kaepernick says his company will handle all the business logistics so creators can focus on storytelling, making Lumi a one-stop shop for all a creator’s needs.

Creators can choose from three monthly subscription tiers — $20, $40, and $75 — with more expensive tiers unlocking advanced features for creators. Kaepernick wants to share the revenue from these stories, physical copies, and merchandising with the creators.

Kaepernick’s plan is centered around making Lumi an entertainment platform for manga fans. The idea is that there’s some value baked into getting a story on Lumi’s website, but that only works if people are coming to the destination.

No stranger to Silicon Valley

Lumi is the first startup Kaepernick has founded, but the former QB has been angel investing since 2017 and tells TechCrunch he has more than 50 investments to date. Kaepernick also sits on the board of digital publishing platform Medium and has since 2020. There, he’s worked alongside influential Silicon Valley investors — including fellow board members such as a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Medium co-founder Evan Williams, and Heretic Ventures founder Mariam Naficy — who he says have shaped his business sense as a tech founder.

“I don’t think I woke up one day and was like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna build a tech company,’” said Kaepernick. “But we were trying to solve this problem for creators that we’re engaging with. It just so happens that the best way for us to do this is by building a tech company.”

Kaepernick says he’s not worried about wading into Silicon Valley more publicly as a founder at this politically charged moment, as some Silicon Valley leaders have publicly endorsed Trump. Kaepernick has been a civil rights activist for nearly a decade, leading the Know Your Rights Camp since 2016, whose mission is to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.” With Lumi, Kaepernick says he’s just focused on product.

“I don’t have any concerns entering the space during this time,” said Kaepernick. “My thinking is, if we are serving our end user and creator in the best way possible, then we will have a successful company and everything else will take care of itself.”

Lumi aims to uplift voices that aren’t given a sufficient platform today. Kaepernick’s business will use a few different foundational AI models, but he’s keen to address the biases that have plagued LLMs for years.

“AI models as they exist today, they’re going to have the biases of the past built into them. We’ve seen that, we know that,” says Kaepernick. “When we think about narratives and how people are represented, AI is going to accelerate things exponentially. That can be both exponentially good and bad. Our hope here is that we build something to create that better path forward for storytellers and creators.