Introducing the Shortbread App—a Netflix for bite-sized mobile comics featuring premium romance series from bestselling authors on Kindle, Wattpad, and Chapters.

Founders

Hi, we’re Fengjiao and Evan, building Shortbread to transform the $130B webcomics industry.
Fengjiao is an engineer who has worked at Vimeo, Adobe, and MIT Media Lab. A former comics creator, she pitched her own projects to webcomics platforms and saw the lack of advanced tech in the space.
Evan is an AI researcher at the Berkeley AI Research Lab and was SWE at Amazon. He founded Generative AI @ Berkeley and grew it to 70 members + partnerships with Microsoft and YC startups in 7 months. He also built talk2arXiv, an open-source RAG system that reached 1st place on Hacker News, 500 stars on GitHub, and is still used by thousands today.

Why Shortbread

🩷 We’re building something women want. We marry the most advanced tech to a centuries-old genre: ROMANCE. A women-led founding team, we deeply understand our audience’s taste and meticulously optimize every algorithm, every storyline, every panel, and every pixel to visualize what today’s women seek.

📖 Story is king. Our debut Shortbread Original series are brought to you by bestselling authors from Kindle, Wattpad, and Chapters—collectively with 64+ million views—and webcomic artists with 2+ billion views. Each story undergoes a rigorous revision process with the best minds in the industry to ensure unparalleled quality.

🎨 We build technology for our creators. We’re building the best technology to enable artists to express their creativity and be freed by the tedious side of drawing. Enabled by our creative studio tools, our team are bringing best-of-its-kind graphics and artwork to the mobile romantic fictions.
A video of our tools: https://youtu.be/QgYWf9rtBp4

Our Ask

Download the Shortbread App on iOS (Android next week ;) with the code YC2024 and get 100 free coins to read beautiful romance stories :).

Invite friends with your personal code in the app for more free bonus coins!