Jiella Esmat and Karine Ahton have launched a new London-based company called 8 Lions Entertainment to leverage the digital IP-building skills they honed while working together at Moonbug Entertainment.

The company has been quietly getting off the ground since June, and already has a handful of significant partners, including popular creator Jaime Amor’s Cosmic Kids Yoga YouTube channel (1.7 million subscribers). 8 Lions set up the deal to build out Amor’s fun yoga videos for kids into a linear TV series called Jaime’s Yoga Adventures, which will launch first in the UK as a Sky Original. 

8 Lions also has an agreement in place with Acamar Films to manage distribution and L&M for its flagship brand Bing in the MENA region. Plus it’s been tapped to develop a growth and monetization strategy for Jordan-based YouTube-first studio Pixitoon. 

CEO Esmat worked at Moonbug as a senior director of distribution and content partnerships from 2019 to 2022, and before that she was chief revenue officer at Amuse Animation. 8 Lions co-founder Ahton was a general counsel and data protection officer at Moonbug from 2019 to 2021, and head of legal & business affairs at Sanrio prior to that. 

Jiella Esmat and Karine Ahton

They have assembled a team of executives—mostly ex-Moonbug staffers—as well as hiring an advisor to provide insights on anime and adult animation projects. Lovely Chavez is on board as VP of digital strategy & commercial partnerships. Her past titles include director of international channels at Moonbug and channel manager at WildBrain. Helen Wong (previously Moonbug’s market development manager for APAC) is senior commercial manager; Fletcher Williams (formerly M&A and strategy manager at Moonbug) is a corporate & strategy executive; and Jerome Mazandarani, ex-Crunchyroll MD for the UK and Ireland, is consulting 8 Lions on the anime market.