Boat Rocker greenlights Nano Runners as first fully financed animated series

Canada’s Boat Rocker Studios has greenlit Nano Runners (26×11’), an animated action-adventure series created by Industrial Brothers co-founder Matthew Fernandes.

Jon Rutherford

The new project marks a meaningful milestone for Boat Rocker as it is the first animated project that it has fully financed internally. The company has previously paid full freight for certain unscripted series, including a trio of recently announced factual titles, but Nano Runners is the first time it has taken this strategy into the animated space.

The show, which will be presented to buyers at Mipcom, follows teenage fugitives Kai and Jade, who flee their home planet after it is destroyed by machines. They crash-land on Earth and discover they have been reduced to the size of insects, where raindrops become dangerous projectiles and beetles appear as giant creatures. The pair set out to find a lost colony of their people, but their search is complicated by the arrival of the machines, which are attempting to strip Earth of its resources.

Nano Runners is produced by Boat Rocker Studios and Industrial Brothers. Boat Rocker previously owned a minority stake in Industrial Brothers for nearly a decade before extending that to a majority stake last summer as it went private after several years as a public entity.

Boat Rocker said Nano Runners has “long been a passion project” for Fernandes and the Industrial Brothers team.

Craig Martin (Sonic Prime) will write and story-edit the series. Executive producers are Boat Rocker co-founders Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier, Jon Rutherford and Industrial Brothers’ Fernandes and Tammy Semen.

Boat Rocker Studios will handle global distribution, as well as managing franchise development and consumer products. The company said the finished series will be available to license in late 2027.

“It’s been a little over a year since Boat Rocker Studios returned to private ownership and refocused our strategy on IP development and ownership. This project, from the immensely talented mind of Matt Fernandes, is exactly the type of project we want to be investing in,” said Rutherford, who serves as Boat Rocker’s president of global content and rights.