Topco Media, the Korean company that operates the webtoon service Toptoon, is no longer going by that name. The firm has officially become Ankey AX Co., Ltd., signalling a strategic shift from a webtoon publisher and distributor into a company that treats artificial intelligence as a core part of its business.
The rename was approved at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting held on September 10. Once corporate registration and the associated listing paperwork are finalized, the company’s KOSDAQ listing will also appear under the Ankey AX name. Alongside the change, the firm broadened its officially registered business purposes to cover AI content, AI chatbots, virtual humans and AI solutions — a legal step that clears the way for it to operate in all of those areas.
From Webtoons to AI Services
Topco Media built its profile on Toptoon, a webtoon platform available in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and North America, and it also runs the web novel service Novelpia. That combination gives the company a deep catalog of original comic and prose IP to draw from — which is precisely the raw material its AI ambitions depend on.
The groundwork has been laid over the past year. The company established an in-house AI studio and moved beyond simply distributing comics into AI-generated animation and short-form video. It has since developed AI-based animation using titles from its own webtoon library, positioning the technology as a way to turn static series into moving content without the cost structure of a traditional animation pipeline.
Toptoon Chat and World Chat
The clearest expression of the new direction is Toptoon Chat, an AI character service that lets readers hold one-on-one conversations with characters pulled from the platform’s webtoons. It launched in Korea in March and has since rolled out to Japan, Taiwan and North America. Crucially, it plugs into the platform’s existing economy: users spend the same coins they already use for reading webtoons to access the AI features, lowering the barrier for existing subscribers to try it.
The company has also introduced World Chat, which expands the format by letting users interact with several characters at once rather than a single conversational partner. Taken together, the two services point toward a model where a webtoon is not just something to read but a persistent world users can talk their way into.
Ankey AX says it intends to keep pushing what it describes as an IP × AI business, adapting its existing webtoon properties into a range of AI-generated formats spanning conversation, narrative and imagery. Details on the company’s plans are posted on Ankey AX’s website.
A Repositioning, Not Just a New Logo
The company has framed the move as an expansion of its established IP business rather than a cosmetic rebrand. Novelpia and its other content platforms remain part of the strategy, with the stated plan being to keep pairing owned IP with AI technology across all of them. The name change, in other words, is meant to reflect what the business is already becoming rather than to announce a departure from webtoons. The rename was reported by edaily.
The shift is worth watching because it runs against the grain of how most comics IP gets monetized. The conventional ladder for a successful webtoon or manga runs toward a licensed animated series, a film, or a live-action drama — the route taken by titles like the upcoming Psyren TV anime or the Spring 2027 adaptation of Everyone’s Idol Has a Secret. Ankey AX is instead betting that conversational and generative formats can extract value from a back catalog directly, without waiting for a studio partner or a broadcast slot.
Whether readers embrace chatting with webtoon characters at scale remains an open question, and AI-generated content continues to draw scrutiny across the comics and animation industries. But with Toptoon Chat already live in four markets and the corporate identity now rebuilt around the strategy, Ankey AX has made its position unambiguous.
Featured image: © Ankey AX
Source: Anime News Network