Comic lovers can start getting ready for a new way to binge their favorite stories. Pocket Entertainment, known for its binge-worthy audio series, is launching Pocket Toons — an AI-enabled comics platform that offers comics stories in a serialized manner.
Pocket Toons is powered by Pocket Entertainment’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) studio, Blaze!, which blends AI with human creativity to produce immersive comics series at a speed 20 times faster, bringing down the cost to about a third. Pocket Entertainment, the Indian startup behind Pocket FM, will invest $15 million to build Pocket Toons, targeting $100 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) by 2026, the company said in a statement.
With Pocket Toons, Pocket Entertainment aims to revolutionize the world of comics — a market pegged to cross $15.38 billion in value by 2033 — and make comics binging a reality. Having successfully created the habit of binge-listening through its episodic audio series of Pocket FM, Pocket Entertainment is confident of putting its playbook into action once again.
Blaze!: AI as the Ultimate Creative Partner
Pocket Entertainment’s Blaze! is a proprietary AI-powered studio that will act as a creative copilot for Pocket Toons’ creators and artists by streamlining multiple stages of comics production — from background rendering and scene composition to coloring and quality control. Blaze! will allow creators to focus on storytelling and character development, ensuring that comics retain the artists’ original style and artistic essence in a faster and more scalable workflow.
Typically, comic titles release just one episode every week. However, with Blaze!, Pocket Toons’ creators will be able to release new episodes every day — something webtoons fans have long been asking for. This transformation in production speeds will increase engagement with readers and allow for greater diversity in the content produced by the comics industry.
“We are producing content 20x faster at a third of the cost, making high-quality comics more accessible than ever,” Shreyas Joshi, SVP of Pocket Toons, said in a recent statement. “Blaze! supercharges artists’ workflow while preserving their creativity and originality, setting a new global benchmark for AI-powered storytelling. Pocket Toons is not about replacing human creativity — it’s about enhancing it.”
Blooming Beta
Pocket Toons has already received an encouraging response after its beta launch in January 2025, offering over 30 unique comic titles to its readers. To date, Pocket Toons has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and its total reading time has crossed 6 million minutes. On average, users spend 60 minutes per day reading through Pocket Toons, while paying users spend double that time.
“At Pocket Entertainment, we are harnessing AI to amplify human creativity — empowering artists to push the boundaries of storytelling without replacing their unique artistic expression. By integrating AI into the creative workflow, we are not just increasing efficiency — we are unlocking new possibilities for storytelling at an unprecedented scale. AI-powered comics aren’t the future — they’re happening now,” CEO and co-founder Rohan Nayak said in a recent press release about Pocket Toons.
AI from India for the world
Besides accelerating the flow of immersive comics to Pocket Toons’ audience, the company’s AI capabilities will also transform audience engagement through personalization, boost targeted global reach with advanced analytics and localization, and facilitate interactive storytelling and experimental genres, among other things.
Pocket Entertainment investors are also upbeat about Blaze! Harsha Kumar, partner at Lightspeed, Pocket’s lead investor, recently stated, “India is making its mark on the global AI stage, and Blaze! is proof of how India is building AI for the world […] As one of our portfolio companies, Pocket FM continues to push the boundaries of innovation, proving that India is at the forefront of shaping the future of global entertainment.”
There’s no doubt that AI-powered storytelling is fast becoming a reality. Yet, while Pocket Entertainment has already tested (and, arguably, achieved) global success with Pocket FM and its list of blockbuster-worthy audio series, will it be able to achieve similar success with Pocket Toons? That, the comics lovers will decide.