Holywater Tech
AI-First Vertical Studio
Ukrainian entertainment-tech company behind the microdrama app My Drama and My Muse, a platform of fully AI-generated vertical series. Its founders set out to disrupt themselves with AI before anyone else could, and report AI series matching live-action on retention.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.1proBuilds AI professionally
- +1.9proUses AI in their work
- +1.9proHas published AI-made work
- +1.3proRecognized for AI work
- +1.0pro3 pro-AI statements (forceful)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Pro-AI · 9.2/10
In their words
We created an AI-generated book, it performed well, then we made it into an AI-generated series, and that performed well too. The future is already here.
Biography
Holywater Tech was founded in Kyiv in March 2020 by Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov and now employs more than 200 people, serving audiences in the US and Western Europe. Its products stack on top of each other: My Passion, a romance e-book app; My Drama, a vertical microdrama service that won a Webby for best streaming service in 2025; and My Muse, launched in 2025, whose series are generated with AI rather than filmed. The company has raised $22 million led by Horizon Capital, taken a strategic investment from Fox Entertainment, and bought the AI-VFX studio Jeynix.
Disrupting yourself on purpose
Where most of the format’s platforms drifted into AI to cut costs, Holywater went in deliberately. Nesvit told Forbes in March 2025 that the company war-gamed its own obsolescence and decided to get there first.
We asked ourselves, “Who will disrupt us?” And the answer was obvious: companies that figure out how to generate books and video series with AI.
The pipeline runs IP-first: an AI-written book is tested on My Passion, and the ones readers finish become AI-generated series built with tools including Runway and LTX Studio. Nesvit says ten episodes can be produced in five days at up to 90% below conventional cost. At Owl & Co.’s Vertical Media Summit in June 2026 he reported that My Muse’s AI series match the retention, conversion, and engagement of the live-action shows on My Drama — the number that matters most to anyone arguing audiences will reject synthetic performers.
The quality isn’t what you’d expect on television, but it works on the tiny smartphone screen. And this is just the beginning. AI-generated content is janky today, but in a few years, it won’t be.
Holywater is the clean case in this corner of the industry: its synthetic series are labelled as such and built from characters it owns, which is precisely what performers like Ashley BeLoat and Evan Gambardella say was missing when MoboReels and GoodShort ran AI versions of shows they had starred in. It competes with ReelShort, whose CEO Joey Jia has argued for keeping humans in the loop by choice.
Quote sources
- Bogdan Nesvit, Forbes, 2025(forbes.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/holywater-tech
