Pocket Entertainment to invest $15 million to scale Pocket Toons

Pocket Entertainment, the recently revamped parent organisation of Pocket FM and Pocket Novel, unveiled Pocket Toons, an AI-powered comics system to revolutionise content creation and distribution. The platform uses Blaze!, an AI-powered studio that increases production speed by 1900% while promising to slash down costs by 66% of the conventional methods adopted.

By automating tasks such as background rendering, scene composition, colouring, and quality control, Pocket Toons frees up content creators to focus purely on storytelling. The platform currently completes three episodes per day for a comic, which, the company informs, is faster than the industry average of releasing one episode per week.

From the time of its last month’s beta launch, Pocket Toons has introduced 30+ titles, with users spending one hour per day on the platform on average. With this launch, while the total reading time has crossed 60 lakh minutes during the last one month, the number of downloads have crossed one-lakh in the past two weeks, the company informs. Pocket Entertainment has allocated a budget of $15 million for 2025 to scale up its operations and is targeting to achieve an annual turnover run rate of $100 million by 2026.

Pocket Toons personalises audience engagement powered by its AI curation engine which recommends creation of content based on specific user preferences. The built-in analytics helps the organisation adapt comics for diverse cultural and linguistic audiences, thus, promising it to accelerate its global reach.

The global comics market is expected to reach $11.39 billion by 2028 and $15.38 billion by 2033, growing from $8.63 billion in 2023, according to statistics shared by the company. Growth in this market, it infroms, is driven by AI-powered content creation, digital adoption, and mobile-first reading experiences. Pocket Toons integrates customised AI models for artists, real-time AI rendering, and AI-powered search and quality control. Each artist receives an AI model that aligns with their style, and intelligent scene-matching ensures artistic consistency.

This development at Pocket Entertainment comes in the wake of recent news of the organisation laying off 75 employees as part of its restructuring. Last year, its popular audio OTT brand, Pocket FM reportedly crossed INR 1,000 crores in revenue in FY-2024. Its advertising revenue reached INR 893.4 crores, posting a seven-fold growth. The brand previously experimented with various consumer engagement models including crowdsourcing of sonic branding via collaborations with musicians such as Sneha Khanwalkar.