A company from Ukraine has become the most visible non-Asian force in the global microdrama business. The story behind it says more about the format’s future than any growth forecast.
In January 2026, Holywater announced a Series A financing round of roughly $22 million led by Horizon Capital, with strategic participation from Endeavor Catalyst and Wheelhouse, the production company of reality-TV veteran Brent Montgomery. Founders Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov called it the largest confirmed microdrama investment outside Asia to date. In a market estimated at around $11 billion globally, that’s a signal – even if the sum remains modest compared to the major Asian players.
The more interesting story is where it all began.
From self-publishing to vertical platform
Holywater was founded in 2020 in Kyiv – initially as a platform for digital books, where amateur authors could publish their work. The idea behind it was IP incubation through community: whoever writes a successful book on My Passion might deliver the next script for a My Drama production.
By the end of 2025, the company’s apps had reached more than 85 million installs, according to its own figures. That helps explain why Holywater is structurally different from some of its competitors: no large studio investors in the background bringing classic Hollywood logic, but a pronounced startup and technology mentality. And it shows in the production philosophy.
The Hollywood connection
In October 2025 – a few months before the funding round – Fox Entertainment announced it was acquiring an equity stake in Holywater. The partnership covers the production of more than 200 original vertical series over two years, plus joint ad sales and brand partnerships.
In early 2026, another step followed: Fox Entertainment and Dhar Mann Studios announced a multi-year partnership to produce an initial slate of 40 narrative vertical titles exclusively for My Drama. Dhar Mann is one of YouTube’s most successful creator-producers and brings a ready-made fan base with him.
And in February 2026, the next visible move: Maksim Chmerkovskiy, known from Dancing with the Stars, took the lead in the vertical series Wild Silence on My Drama according to Holywater, the first U.S. vertical series with a reality-TV star in a leading role. The message behind it is clear: My Drama doesn’t want to be seen as a cheap genre product, but as a platform where star power is possible.
AI as production strategy
Alongside the funding round, Holywater made another acquisition public in February 2026: the purchase of Jeynix, a production team specializing in AI-assisted visual effects, based in Lisbon. Its capabilities include facial animation, face replacement, de-aging, and lip-sync technologies meant to make series produced on small budgets look more high-end, and to enable rapid localization into multiple languages within days.
That last point is decisive for any global expansion strategy. Anyone who can produce content for the U.S. market and then localize it for European, Latin American, or Asian markets within days has a scaling advantage over traditional production houses. The renaming to Holywater Tech is no coincidence: the company explicitly sees itself as an AI-first technology company that produces entertainment, not the other way around.
What the founders say — and what it means
In May 2026, Nesvit and Kasianov defended the format against persistent skepticism in a Deadline interview. Nesvit’s comparison is pointed: people used to say YouTube was just a platform for cat videos, or that Netflix would never succeed. Microdramas, too, were dismissed as a fad just two years ago and now the big Hollywood studios want in.
The comparison has a weakness. In their early phase, YouTube and Netflix were disruptive on the platform side but broad in content. Microdrama apps like My Drama are narrow in content – romance, thriller, melodrama – and their audience is demographically concentrated, predominantly female, predominantly between 25 and 45. That’s a loyal, well-monetizing target group. But it isn’t automatically an infinitely scalable one.
My take: The real question for Holywater isn’t whether the format survives – it will. The question is whether My Drama can hold its own in the U.S. market against established giants like ReelShort and DramaBox, or whether a profitable second tier emerges in which the company operates comfortably. Both would be a success. But they are very different kinds of success.
The European dimension
For InsideVerticals readers, the more relevant question is a different one: what does Holywater’s rise mean for Europe?
First, the obvious. With Holywater, there is for the first time a non-Asian, non-American company playing a serious role in the global microdrama market, founded in Ukraine, today with Hollywood ties and a global IP pipeline. It shows that the market doesn’t necessarily have to be monopolized by a handful of platforms from China and the U.S.
What Holywater concretely offers Europe remains thin for now. The content is English-language and U.S.-centric. No public strategy for German, French, or Spanish productions is visible. Jeynix’s AI localization technology is the most promising approach but whether and when it will be systematically deployed for European markets is open.
The investor structure is telling too: Horizon Capital is a region-focused private equity fund, Endeavor and Wheelhouse are U.S. entertainment capital. Europe, whether as investor or as production market, barely appears.
Anyone in Europe who wants a stake in the microdrama market should read this gap not as a threat, but as an opportunity. Holywater has proven that you don’t necessarily have to build this market from China or Los Angeles. But you have to do it before others fill the gap.
Quellen: The Hollywood Reporter, 15. Januar 2026 | Deadline: Holywater chiefs on investment, Disney & YouTube | Holywater Tech acquires Jeynix, THR | Variety: Fox Entertainment invests in Holywater | Wild Silence / Chmerkovskiy, Deadline
