We pair the writers who built the world's most exported telenovelas with a production model that blends AI and real actors, producing Spanish-language micro drama and sketch comedy at a fraction of what anyone else in the region can, and license them to every platform starved for original supply.
Vertical micro drama went from nothing to an eight-billion-dollar business in about three years. ReelShort and DramaBox each cleared 50 million monthly actives, and Latin America is now the fastest-growing region in the world for it. The platforms are buying — DramaBox alone is producing 20+ locally adapted titles across Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, on non-exclusive deals where a single production earns across every platform at once. And Spanish-first platforms are already funded and scaling — Idilio, the a16z-backed microdrama app, just raised $5M and passed 1.3 million downloads. The demand is here, and it's writing checks.
In Q1 2025, 16 of the top 20 international short dramas by revenue were locally produced, not dubbed. Cultural authenticity drives retention, and retention is the entire business.
The demand is exploding and the shelves are stocked with dubbed imports. The window for authentic, Spanish-first originals is open right now, and closing.
Hook in sixty seconds. A cliffhanger every episode. Orphans, swapped identities, revenge, a secret inheritance, a wedding interrupted. Eighty episodes of escalating melodrama. Chinese studios independently reinvented, at 90 seconds, the exact structure Venezuelan television perfected at 45 minutes in 1985.
Everyone is racing on production. Within 18 months, AI video is table stakes and worth nothing. The scarce input is story architecture.
Knowing how to build a hook that survives eighty episodes without collapsing is a craft that takes decades to learn, and it's held by a specific, finite group of people. Most of them are Venezuelan. Most of them haven't had steady work since the industry collapsed.
Kassandra entered the Guinness book as the most-sold telenovela in the world — 180+ countries, 40 languages. During the Bosnia war in 1992, the population petitioned authorities not to interrupt the broadcast, and it produced actual ceasefires. That industry is gone. The people who built it are not — dispersed between Caracas and Miami, deeply underemployed, holding the most valuable and least replicable skill in a format that just became an eight-billion-dollar business.
DramaBox is producing in Bogotá and Mexico City. Holywater has AI and Fox money. Nobody has assembled the writers' room, because nobody thought to look in the place where the industry died.
Vertical drama apps are paid-acquisition wars, and $150K is not a weapon in that fight. So we don't fight there. We produce Spanish-language originals in two vertical formats — micro drama and sketch comedy — and license them non-exclusively to the platforms: revenue from the first delivery, no user-acquisition spend, ever. Two inputs, both of which we have unfair access to.
The story architecture that built the world's most exported melodrama, adapted to vertical grammar. The scarce input, held by the people who invented it.
We blend an AI pipeline — persistent characters that hold a face across a series, already built — with real actors and locations where they earn their keep. That mix turns $150K from one shot into many, without ever looking cheap.
The platforms are customers, not competitors — they're actively short on Spanish-language original supply:
A conventionally produced vertical season in the region runs $100,000 to $200,000. That's why our AI-and-actors blend isn't a garnish, it's the only structure where the math works at our size without sacrificing the human performance that makes a scene land.
A single shot on goal in a business where you cannot predict the hit. That's not a company, it's a lottery ticket, and one shot is the worst possible position.
The same capital, turned into a portfolio of attempts. Craft raises the floor on each one; volume raises the odds that one breaks out. Attempts are the strategy.
Most competitors — In-To Films, Dos Ke Tres, VIP 2000, Latin Media — produce conventionally, at conventional cost. Holywater Tech, running My Drama and My Muse with Fox producing 200 titles, is ahead of us on AI and on capital. That's the whole bet: in eighteen months, when AI video is a commodity, the defensible asset is the room that knows how to build the story — and that room is Venezuelan, underemployed, and waiting for the call.
I've spent years doing standup and theater — which is exactly where the sketch comedy comes from — and it taught me the same thing these telenovela writers know from the other end: how long you can hold an audience before you have to pay something off. That's the entire craft of a 90-second episode, drama or comedy.
I'm also an engineering leader — Jamf, Accenture — and I've already built the AI content pipeline this depends on, including persistent AI-generated characters that stay consistent across a series. Most people in this space have one half of that. I have both.
And I'm from Caracas, which is why I know where the writers are, and why they'll take my call.
Whether you're a platform short on Spanish supply, a telenovela writer, or an investor — tell us who you are and we'll be in touch.