Pocket Entertainment, the parent company of Pocket FM and Pocket Novel, has forayed into webcomics with the launch of Pocket Toons, an artificial intelligence (AI)-first comics platform.
It will provide consumers bite-sized stories in the form of webtoons across genres.
“We believe that great stories should not be confined in the boundaries of formats or geographies. We have some of our content IPs work across all formats, boundaries, age groups,” said Shreyas Joshi, SVP of Pocket Toons.
Pocket Toons will use Blaze, which the company says is enabling creators to produce high-quality, episodic content 20 times faster and at one-third the production cost. The company will release three episodes of a comic each day.
“We aim to give people a fresh episode drop every single day of the week, We make about 21 episodes in a week and we make it at one third the cost,” added Joshi.
The Bengaluru-based company will let users purchase these episodes through micro-payments, a model already used by the firm’s audio series platform, Pocket FM.
Pocket Toons, which launched its beta phase in January, offers 30 comic titles. On average, users spend 60 minutes daily on the app, while paying users engage for twice as long. To accelerate growth, the company has committed $15 million to scale the platform in 2025, aiming to achieve a $100 million annualized revenue run rate (ARR) by 2026.
From a geographical point of view, the company is focusing on the US as a market. “As of now, our focus is on the US. Outside of East Asia, that’s the largest market for comics,” he said.
AI in Pocket Toons
The company’s AI tool Blaze will automate complex processes such as background rendering, scene composition, colouring and quality control, allowing artists to focus on storytelling and character development rather than production bottlenecks.
“We are currently using this in-house. But of course, we plan make this tool available to creators at large in due course,” said Joshi.
The company plans to covert its ‘blockbuster IPs’ across Pocket FM and Pocket Novel into comics in the next few months. This move will help the company to expand its reach and, as a result, increase the revenue generated from popular shows.
The company in December 2024, said it had over seven audio series surpassing $10 million in revenue and about 35 audio series that had crossed the million dollar revenue mark.
Overall, Pocket Entertainment surpassed the ₹1,000-crore revenue milestone in the financial year 2023-24 (FY24), with revenues totalling ₹1,051.97 crore. The US accounts for 70 per cent of the firm’s revenues followed by India at 15 percent and the remaining from the rest of the world
