Crunchyroll Acquires 7.03% of Japanese Media Company Link-U
Japanese media company Link-U Group announced a new business partnership with Crunchyroll on Monday. The Link-U Group issued an third-party allotment of its shares at 856 yen (about US$5.50) per share, and Crunchyroll will acquire 917 million yen (about US$5.91 million) of those shares of Link-U. After this transaction, Crunchyroll will become the fifth-largest shareholder of Link-U with a 7.03% stake.
Link-U plans to use the investment as part of the "medium-term management plan 2030" strategy that it also announced on Monday. The plan will include expanding the distribution of manga to audiences outside of Japan through developing manga distribution platforms, and localization management.
The Crunchyroll Manga app launched on iOS and Android devices in the United States and Canada in October 2025. The ad-free app is separate from the main Crunchyroll streaming service. Crunchyroll describes the service as being "powered by Link-U Group." Partner publishers for the service include AlphaPolis, Compass, Square Enix, Viz Media, Yen Press, Shueisha, J-Novel Club, and ThirdlineNEXT.
Link-U operates such services as digital manga site Comikey, digital manga store Compass, webtoon company Studio Moon6, and VTuber and streaming production company Romanz. In addition to Crunchyroll Manga, Link-U has worked on Shueisha's MANGA Plus, Square Enix's Manga UP!, and similar manga services from other companies.
Sources: PR Times, Animation Business Journal (Tadashi Sudo)
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.