The studio betting that the next great screen is the one already in your hand - vertical, episodic, and ninety seconds long.
Who they are now
Somewhere right now, a commuter is three episodes deep into a series about a wolf, a moon, and a woman in a red dress. Each episode is shorter than the train between two stops. She did not sit down to watch a movie. She did not open Netflix. She opened an app called My Drama, turned her phone the way phones are actually held - upright - and let the story come to her in pieces. That commuter is one of more than 85 million people who have installed something HOLYWATER TECH made.
HOLYWATER is an AI-first entertainment company. It writes stories, films them vertically, cuts them into one-to-two-minute episodes, and ships them to phones in the United States and Europe. It runs four apps off one idea. And it does this from Los Angeles, having started in a Kyiv office with six people and a hunch.
"We are an alternative to Netflix, HBO, and even Hollywood."
The problem they saw
The film industry spent a century perfecting the horizontal frame and the two-hour commitment. Then the phone arrived and quietly rewrote the contract. People now watch in vertical, in transit, in bursts of seconds, with a thumb hovering over the next thing. The screens changed. The stories, mostly, did not.
This is the tension HOLYWATER exists inside: the gap between how stories are made - slowly, expensively, in landscape - and how they are now consumed - fast, cheaply, in portrait. Asia had already proven that "microdrama" worked at enormous scale. The West kept treating it as a novelty, the entertainment equivalent of a snack you are slightly embarrassed to enjoy. HOLYWATER decided the snack was the meal.
"We unlock people's potential by merging their imagination with the power of AI."
The founders' bet
Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov founded HOLYWATER in early 2020. They share the title of Co-CEO, which sounds like a compromise and is actually a division of labor: one leans product and story, the other leans engineering. Their bet was unfashionable at the time - that you could industrialize storytelling without hollowing it out, using AI to handle the parts that scale badly and humans for the parts that do not.
It is the kind of bet that looks obvious only in retrospect. In 2020 it mostly looked like two Ukrainians making short videos for phones. Five years later the team has grown roughly thirty-fold, the apps have crossed 85 million installs, and the investors writing checks include the people who fund actual television.
The story so far
HOLYWATER is founded in Kyiv by Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov. The team fits in a single room.
My Passion (reading) and My Drama (vertical series) grow, joined later by My Muse and Freebits. One story engine, four front doors.
My Drama wins Best Streaming Service at the Webby Awards - validation on a screen you hold in one hand.
Fox Entertainment invests and signs a deal to produce 200-plus vertical series, including 40 with creator Dhar Mann.
Horizon Capital leads a $22M raise with Endeavor Catalyst and Wheelhouse - reported as the largest confirmed microdrama round outside Asia.
HOLYWATER acquires AI-VFX studio Jeynix to fold visual effects into its production pipeline.
The product
HOLYWATER does not sell a single app; it runs a small network of them. Each one is a different way into the same machine - take a story, shape it for a phone, and let an audience pay for the next episode.
The flagship. 100+ original short-form series with 1-2 minute episodes. Top shows clear 10M+ views; the app ranks among Europe's and the U.S.'s leading vertical-drama platforms.
A digital book marketplace for readers 16+, ranked #1 in multiple countries. Often the source material that becomes a vertical series later.
AI-powered generation of vertical series, audiobooks, and interactive stories - the clearest expression of the "merge imagination with AI" mission.
Ad-supported vertical streaming offering free access to premium series - the on-ramp for audiences not ready to subscribe.
"From books to audiobooks, and video series, we build worlds you can explore and personalize."
The proof
A thesis is just a slide deck until the install counter agrees with it. HOLYWATER's did. The line below is the kind of curve that turns a niche format into a funding round - and a Ukrainian startup into a company Fox wanted a piece of.
The mission
HOLYWATER frames itself as an AI-first entertainment network, not a video app. The distinction matters. An app competes for a slot on a home screen; a network competes for the habit. The mission - unlocking human potential by merging imagination with AI - is the company's way of saying it wants AI to do the grinding so people can do the dreaming. Whether that holds as the catalog scales is the open question, and HOLYWATER seems comfortable answering it in public.
"We are the new era of storytelling."
Why it matters tomorrow
Go back to that commuter. A few years ago her options were a feed of strangers' clips or a streaming app built for a television she was not near. Now there is a third thing: a story made for exactly the screen she is holding, in exactly the length she has. HOLYWATER did not invent vertical video, and it did not invent the microdrama. What it did was treat both as a serious place to build a company - with a Webby, a Fox deal, and 85 million installs to show a skeptic. The wolf, the moon, the red dress: small stories, made to fit a small screen, adding up to something that is no longer small.