Radish Fiction

» see radishfiction.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

radish belonged to a mobile-fiction category that never had a moment in turkey. english serial romance chapters unlocked one at a time on a phone was not something anyone in my orbit did. by 2018 i was 34, working the ankara edge-ai job, reading paperback nonfiction on planes. the radish user was a woman in the us or the uk, mid-twenties to mid-forties, reading twenty minutes a night on a phone in bed. that was not a bracket i knew from turkey.

seung yoon lee founded radish in february 2016 in new york after coming out of oxford as a korean rhodes scholar. before radish he had done a stint as a foreign correspondent for byline, a crowdfunded journalism startup that never quite worked. the pitch for radish was straight cliffhanger economics. write episodic romance in short chapters, release one every day or two, charge for early access to the next installment through an in-app coin system.

by january 2017 the company had raised about $3 million in seed from y combinator and other early-stage investors. the model landed. radish did most of the writing in-house after 2018 rather than relying on user-generated stories, contracting professional serial-fiction writers to produce werewolf romance and billionaire romance under house pen names. in august 2020 softbank ventures asia led a $63.2 million series a. forbes wrote it up under the "netflix for serialized fiction" tag.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the kakao years ~

in may 2021 kakao entertainment bought radish for $440 million. kakao had also bought tapas media the same year for around $510 million. the strategy was to build a global mobile-first content pipeline that would feed korean webtoon and web-novel ip into western markets, then license it back into k-drama adaptations. radish fit as the english-language serial-fiction wing. seung yoon lee stayed on as ceo of the acquired unit. the founder was 32.

the top-line growth number kakao had underwritten did not materialize past 2022. in 2023 the parent company took a goodwill impairment charge of 425.2 billion korean won on its investments in radish and tapas. that is roughly $325 million written down against the two acquisitions combined. korea economic daily reported at the time that the pair of us content bets was among the drags on kakao entertainment's stalled ipo track. seung yoon lee had already stepped back and pivoted into a blockchain content-provenance project called story protocol.

~ the day it died ~

on 3 july 2025 kakao entertainment emailed radish users. the service would end 31 december 2025. all remaining coins, coupons, gift passes and unlocked chapters would become inaccessible after that date. the platform would keep paying royalties to writers through the shutdown. publishers weekly and anime news network covered the announcement inside a week. kcomicsbeat framed it as another data point in the "kakao clears the deck for ipo" narrative that had been running since the 2023 impairment.

~ what got buried ~

radish had built a house of paid-per-chapter serial fiction that ran to thousands of individual romance stories written by contracted authors. after 31 december 2025 the app stopped downloading new chapters and the web reader went offline. readers who wanted their unlocked libraries to survive had six months to screenshot their way through the app. writer royalties continued through the wind-down. the ip itself sits with kakao entertainment now, dormant, waiting for a resale to a serial-fiction operator that has not yet appeared.

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