[Korean Startup Interview] ShortFlow Wants to Become the ‘Alibaba of Short-Drama IP’ Trading

One-to-three-minute vertical dramas are quietly rewriting the map of the global content industry. What once looked like an unfamiliar Chinese fad has become mainstream at a speed that makes the word “unfamiliar” feel obsolete. According to research from Media Partners Asia, the global short-drama market was worth roughly $12 billion (approximately KRW 17 trillion) in 2025 and is projected to grow to $26 billion (approximately KRW 38 trillion) by 2030. Given that the market was only $5 billion as recently as 2023, it has more than doubled in two years.

The grammar of this market is different from traditional drama. A short-form drama is a series of one-to-three-minute episodes running 50 to 100 chapters — a total runtime similar to long-form content, but a completely different way of consuming it. The core is a webtoon-like monetization structure where a micro-payment is triggered each time a viewer moves to the next episode. As a result, a short-form drama lives or dies on how badly the viewer wants to know what happens next. The three-part “Hook–Conflict–Cliffhanger” structure has to fire in every single episode. That is precisely why K-drama, despite its powerful global brand, has yet to make its mark in short form: Korea’s production grammar, built around a slow narrative arc, clashes with the short-form DNA of forcing viewers to pay for the next episode.

Even so, it was China that built this market first and biggest. Rooted in Chinese web-novel culture, short-form drama spread rapidly through platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, and in 2024 the market reached 50.4 billion yuan (approximately KRW 10 trillion), surpassing China’s box office (47 billion yuan) for the first time in history. The players that carried this revenue model abroad were ReelShort and DramaBox. Both apps seed one-to-two-minute, provocative openings on Instagram and TikTok to lure users into dedicated apps, then cut the video at the peak of conflict to drive coin payments of a few hundred won per episode. The strategy worked. According to Sensor Tower, in the first quarter of 2025 alone the two apps earned $130 million and $120 million in in-app purchase revenue respectively, splitting roughly 70% of the global short-form drama in-app payment market between them.

But structural problems surface as the market grows. Right now, supply and demand are exploding simultaneously in what looks like a warring-states era. More than 200 dedicated short-form drama platforms are already active worldwide, and existing OTT services and local media channels in each country are steadily adding short-form categories. The supply side is no different. The rapid spread of AI tools is collapsing short-drama production costs that traditionally exceeded KRW 200 million down to a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and in January 2026 alone, 14,634 AI short dramas were released in China. An era in which individual creators make dramas and supply them worldwide is already reality.

The problem is that there is no infrastructure connecting this explosive supply and demand. It takes a production company at least three months to sign a contract with a single platform, format standards and contract terms differ from platform to platform, and the entire process runs on manual, email-and-Excel-based work. Recent reports of disputes over credit deletion and distribution-rights exclusion at K-short-form co-production sites are the inevitable collisions produced by an industry structure that lacks standardized distribution infrastructure.

BABLE Company, which operates the Korean startup ShortFlow, attacks this structural gap head-on. As a B2B two-sided marketplace connecting IP suppliers — production companies and creators — with global platforms, it lets a supplier register IP once and pitch it simultaneously to global platforms serving more than 60 countries. An AI-based automatic matching engine analyzes an IP’s genre, format, and target market to recommend the best-fit platforms, and contracting, settlement, and revenue-share (RS) management are all handled from a single dashboard. The key is compressing a contract cycle that used to take more than three months down to two or three weeks.

The founder and CEO, Dahae Kang, holds a master’s and doctorate in cultural content from Peking University and has been a hands-on operator who built content commerce businesses since the height of China’s wanghong (influencer) boom. We sat down with Kang to discuss the short-drama market’s present and future.

Q. Can you briefly introduce BABLE Company and ShortFlow?

BABLE Company operates ShortFlow, a B2B transaction infrastructure that directly connects production companies with global platforms in the explosively growing short-form drama market worldwide. Short-form drama started in China and is now spreading very rapidly to the U.S., Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Especially in China, it became so popular last year that it surpassed box-office revenue, and top global platforms like ReelShort generated combined in-app and advertising revenue of approximately KRW 1 trillion last year — the market is already huge.

What makes short-form drama different from regular drama is that each episode runs about one to three minutes as a vertical series. Episodes stretch from 50 to 100 chapters for a total runtime of roughly 90 minutes to two hours. Optimized for mobile, it can be enjoyed as casually as scrolling Shorts or Reels.

Q. How did you enter this market?

I completed my master’s and doctorate in cultural content at Peking University in Beijing, then worked in content-related business in Singapore for about five years — a total of 11 years in the greater China region. Initially, during the peak of China’s wanghong (influencer) boom, I ran a content commerce business matching wanghongs with Korean brands. Then, as the Chinese market shifted rapidly toward short drama, my existing partner companies suggested I try it in Korea. That was the trigger. I jumped into short-drama production directly in 2023 and entered this market in earnest.

Q. What problems did you discover once you started producing yourself?

The first wall I hit when I started producing was distribution. Every platform wanted different format standards and assets, so it was extremely difficult to customize and contact them one by one. But because we had a global network, other production companies started asking us, “Can you distribute ours too?”

So we began pooling other companies’ IP and distributing it on their behalf. As we did, I realized the platforms’ infrastructure couldn’t keep up either. The market exploded so quickly that they were still trading through manual work via messengers and Excel. Production companies wanted their IP distributed to more places, and platforms wanted to find content optimized for them, but there was no proper infrastructure connecting the two. As a result, it took more than three months for content to be released on a platform. Short-drama trends change extremely fast, and that lag felt like such a waste.

Q. Is there a reason Korean production companies haven’t yet gained traction in short form?

This is actually something we looked into very closely at the beginning. K-content already has proven competitiveness in the global market. But when it moves to short form, performance doesn’t measure up compared to overseas producers.

There’s a reason. Short-form drama uses a monetization structure like webtoons, triggering payment every episode. So the life or death of a short drama depends on how desperately the viewer wants to know what happens next. The “Hook–Conflict–Cliffhanger” three-part structure has to fire in every single episode. Korean production is accustomed to a narrative arc built around a slow, deliberate flow — setup, development, twist, conclusion — and that grammar clashes with short form’s DNA of making viewers pay for the next episode every time.

So we’re building an AI prediction model that evaluates whether a plan’s structure fits short-form grammar and assesses hit potential, plus a feature that auto-extracts information from an uploaded plan to speed IP registration. That way, creators can see in advance whether their work is suitable for short form before they invest time and money.

Q. How does the platform work from the buyer’s perspective?

On the platform, buyers see content almost like a B2C service — posters, trailers, and free episodes (5 to 10 chapters) — along with details like exclusivity, contract availability windows, and current distribution status. Platforms can search and manage large volumes of IP at once, as if adding items to a shopping cart. The entire flow from proposal to metadata download, contract, and settlement is handled within a single “deal-flow” dashboard.

Q. What’s the business model?

Content is a long-tail business that doesn’t end with a single payout. When content first launches, the platform pays a Minimum Guarantee (MG) — a confirmed upfront advance. Then, once a three-to-six-month hold period lifts, secondary distribution to new platforms compounds revenue share over time. ShortFlow takes a fee on these transactions, and as combinations of IP and channels multiply, marginal cost converges toward zero while revenue compounds.

Q. Tell us about the Beijing launch showcase in May.

At the official launch on May 12 at the Korean Cultural Center in Beijing, all 10 of the top global short-form platforms — including ReelShort, DramaBox, iQIYI, GoodShort, and NetShort — attended. It was the first time a Korean startup gathered the industry’s leading platforms in one place. Since launch, 30 global platforms have onboarded, all top-10 platforms are in, and roughly 500 IP titles have been secured — nearly half of them AI-produced. We’re targeting 2,000 IP titles and more than 70 onboarded platforms by year-end, with channels across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and India in progress. We plan to admit individual AI creators as suppliers in the second half.

Q. What’s your biggest competitive advantage?

Our biggest strength is a “business first, technology second” approach — a team that built the market, made the deals, and felt the field’s problems firsthand before solving them with technology. Selection for the TIPS Global Track and the Korea Creative Content Agency’s investment-linked startup program serves as official validation of the model.

Q. Aren’t you worried about being cut out as platforms grow stronger?

No single platform can monopolize this warring-states market for years to come. Our long-term strategy is not to remain a pure intermediary — once we hold more content than anyone, ShortFlow itself could evolve into an IP platform.

Q. What are your fundraising plans?

We’re raising a Pre-Series A round of KRW 2 billion (approximately $1.45 million), targeting the third quarter of 2026. ShortFlow’s stated goal is to become the standard trading infrastructure connecting short-form IP suppliers with global platforms — just as Alibaba came to dominate the B2B trade infrastructure linking small manufacturers with global buyers — and to build BABLE Company into a firm worth KRW 100 billion by 2030.