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Tag: Toonsutra

  • Toonsutra emerges as a Webtoon app, expanding with global publishers

    Toonsutra emerges as a Webtoon app, expanding with global publishers

    Mumbai: Toonsutra,  a homegrown webtoon comic app, announced today that in just a few months it has firmly established itself as the #1 comic app in India in both the Apple and Android stores. A position it has maintained for over two months with over a million downloads of the app already.

    Toonsutra’s mission is to bring together a community of passionate fandom and pop culture, catering to the largest youth market in the world – India’s 700 million+ mobile youth market. It is the only premium webtoon comics app in the region dedicated to catering to Indian audiences with Hindi, Tamil and Telegu language content offerings.

    The company has already locked up partnership deals with some of the biggest global publishers and creators to bring over 550 titles and 250,000 episodes of content into local Indian languages – the largest offering of premium, high-quality, webtoon comic content ever assembled for this market, in easy-to-read vertical scroll format optimized for mobile.

    As the excitement for the global webtoon market continues to grow with the US$2.7 Billion IPO yesterday by Naver’s Webtoon Entertainment, the medium and fandom around these new storytelling comic platforms is finding new audiences and territories. The global webtoon market is projected to reach a staggering $60 Billion by 2030, making it one of the highest-growing new categories for media and content.

    Toonsutra is founded by veteran media entrepreneurs, Sharad Devarajan who is the company’s executive chairman, and Vishal Anand, Toonsutra’s CEO.

    Devarajan is also the founder/CEO of the leading Indian character entertainment company, Graphic India and brings over 25 years of comic and fandom experience, having created over 200 episodes of animation and 300 comics. He created Spider-Man India with Marvel; created and produced the #1 hit show, Baahubali: Crown of Blood, with SS Rajamouli; created and produced The Legend of Hanuman series with Disney+Hotstar which remains the #1 animated project in Indian history.

    Anand is a serial digital media entrepreneur and was formerly CPO of Dailyhunt where he was part of the core initial team managing their product and tech teams to scale the business into one of India’s most successful media platforms (currently with over 300M users). Anand was also part of the product leadership team at Amazon Web Services.

    “Toonsutra is not just an app, it’s a fandom community and a pop-culture movement. We’re bridging the gap between global storytelling and local audiences, creating a new language of entertainment that resonates with India’s digital-first generation. Our rapid growth shows that Indian audiences are hungry for the highest-quality, premium webtoon comic stories made available in their languages and easily snackable mobile short episodes” commented Toonsutra co-founder & chairman Sharad Devarajan.

    “The initial success we are seeing for Toonsutra underscores a fundamental shift in content consumption patterns across the Indian youth. We’re not just riding the wave of digital transformation; we’re actively shaping it by combining cutting-edge technology with compelling storytelling. At Toonsutra we are creating an ecosystem where the biggest global creators and publishers can thrive by reaching entirely new regional language audiences, and Indian readers can discover new worlds with every scroll. Our mission goes beyond entertainment – we’re fostering a new era of creativity, community and creative expression in India,” added Toonsutra co-founder & CEO, Vishal Anand.

    Toonsutra has become a trusted source by global partners for bringing their top content to Indian audiences with the highest quality webtoon formatting and translation, ensuring that Indian language audiences can experience the very best of the world’s comic storytelling. International partnerships include Valiant Comics, Webtoon Factory, Kenaz, Archie Comics, and Boom! Studios, Top Cow Productions, Liquid Comics, and numerous others. 

    In addition to award-winning and bestselling comics from global creators, Toonsutra also has exclusive webtoon comics available based on some of the biggest Indian franchises, including the film sensation, Baahubali; and the hit streaming series, The Legend of Hanuman, and hundreds of Indian episodes from leading Indian comic publisher Graphic India.

    Toonsutra is also backed by a leading group of investors including the Sony Innovation Fund; Maiora Capital, Kun Gao (co-founder, Crunchyroll); Jeremy Liew (partner, Lightspeed); Kevin Lin (co-founder, Twitch); Patrick Lee (co-founder, Rotten Tomatoes); Holly Lui (co-founder, Kabam); Benjamin Grubbs (co-founder, CreatorPlus); Steve Chung (fmr. CEO of Americas, CJENM); and others.

    To learn more about Toonsutra and its exciting features, visit www.toonsutra.com

    The Toonsutra app is free to download on Android and iOS devices.

  • The comic & Webtoon app ‘Toonsutra’ is now live on Android & iOS

    The comic & Webtoon app ‘Toonsutra’ is now live on Android & iOS

    Mumbai: Toonsutra has launched the country’s biggest webtoon app that can be accessed and enjoyed by all Indian Android & iOS users. Webtoon platforms have become an explosive phenomenon across the world growing to US$4.7 billion in 2021 and projected to exceed US$60 billion a year by 2030. The digital media startup spun out last year from Graphic India – the country’s leading original character entertainment company. Validating the timing and the potential this opportunity presents for the Indian webtoon market, Sony Innovation Fund recently became an investor in Toonsutra.

    Through the Toonsutra app, comic fans can consume some of the best global and local comic content and stories in Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and English languages in an easy-to-read vertical scroll format optimized for mobile. Content in Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam and Kannada will also be available soon. Breaking the mould of traditional comic reading, Toonsutra provides readers with comics in bite-sized snackable episodes, each of which delivers an enticing narrative leaving the hooked reader anticipating the next thrilling episode.

    “Toonsutra plans to spark a new wave of pop-culture entertainment across India connecting millions and building the largest community of fandom across comics, webtoons, animation, genre and fiction,” commented  Graphic India co-founder and CEO Sharad Devarajan. “Just as we saw with the streaming video revolution, India’s entertainment audience is excited to experience and experiment with a wide variety of the best content from across the world, and also groundbreaking local originals from homegrown creators. Comics and webtoons are the next big visual storytelling medium for the country and Toonsutra is bringing the highest quality comic stories by the greatest global creators to India’s vernacular languages for the first time.”

    The app will offer episodes from different genres including fantasy, romance, mythology, superhero, sci-fi, action and more. Toonsutra’s new storytelling home will showcase the highest quality web-toon and comic stories from top Indian and global creators, including stories from icons Stan Lee, Grant Morrison, Ryan Pagelow, Shekhar Kapur, Jeevan J. Kang, Mounica Tata, Rohan Chakravarty, Alicia Souza. The platform will also promote emerging rising star creators from across India giving them a home to tell their stories.

    “The webtoon mobile comic space has taken off globally and is projected to exceed US$60 Billion a year by 2030. India’s massive 700 million youth market is looking for new, engaging, snackable, high-quality experiences. Toonsutra’s web-toon bite-sized format will appeal to this young consumer who consumes entertainment very differently today. A convenient vertical scroll is native to where everyone is on their phones 24×7!” said veteran mobile and media startup leader, Vishal Anand who recently joined as Toonsutra’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “With India’s media and entertainment market expected to grow from $23 billion to $100 billion by 2030, we believe web-toon comics are perfectly positioned to be one of the largest accelerants for that growth,” he added. Previously, as Chief Product Officer and part of the core initial team at Dailyhunt, Anand helped scale one of India’s most successful media platforms to over 100M active users and build and manage their product and tech teams. Most recently Anand was part of the product leadership team at Amazon Web Services.

    As readers dive deeper into webtoons, they will earn coins, unlock rewards, and discover hidden bonus surprises and community features. The more they read, the more they are rewarded, enhancing the excitement of their storytelling journey. Readers can seamlessly enjoy their daily dose of entertainment without having to pinch, zoom or scale pages, unlike other normal comic reader PDF apps. In addition to free daily content, fans can also purchase and binge on episodes for as low as INR 5, making comics finally accessible to everyone.

    The vast library available on Toonsutra includes exclusive content with numerous global partners, including:

    Graphic India’s leading Indian comic stories such as 18 Days, Devi, Shadow Tiger, Dragonfly, The Mighty Yeti and Chakra The Invincible; the epic comics based on Baahubali: The Lost Legends and more.

    The vast Archie Comics library will be made available in vernacular languages for the first time, featuring stories about Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and the gang from Riverdale. Just in time to catch up on the original comics that inspired the upcoming ‘The Archies’ film coming in December to Netflix.  

    Superhero lovers in India can finally enter the world of Valiant Comics, one of the world’s largest superhero universes, and enjoy hit titles like X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, Harbinger, Ninjak and dozens more.

    Cinema lovers can experience the Liquid Comics library with original comics made by some of the world’s most iconic filmmakers including Wes Craven’s ‘Coming of Rage’; Barry Sonnenfeld’s ‘Dinosaurs vs. Aliens’; Guy Ritchie’s ‘The Gamekeeper; and John Woo’s ‘Seven Brothers’ to name a few.

    Manga fans can enjoy, stories from Kenaz, a leading South Korean-based studio that specializes in vertical manga series in popular categories such as love, romance, fantasy, and action with acclaimed titles such as Evil Hunter, Blood Type Love, The Distance between Us, The Scent of Love and more.

    Toonsutra will also be putting the spotlight on home-grown creators from India such as the inimitable Alicia Souza whose designs and comics have brought joy to millions; the amazing Mounica Tata who portrays life in India through an intelligent, satirical, and comic lens; and Rohan Chakravarty whose Green Humor comics highlight important environmental topics with hilarious wit; and new Indian creators being constantly added.

    Toonsutra’s early backers include some of the biggest names in tech and media such as entrepreneurs, Rotten Tomatoes co-founder Patrick Lee; Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin; Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao; Jeremy Liew partner Lightspeed Venture Partners; Rishad Tobaccowala, Fmr. chief growth officer, Publicis Group; Michael Maher, founder, Start Media; Benjamin Grubbs, co-founder, CreatorPlus; Holly Lui, co-founder, Kabam; Ray Chan, co-founder, 9GAG; Sandeep Kumar Sood, co-Founder, Junglee Games; and others.  

  • India gets its own webtoon comics app – Toonsutra

    India gets its own webtoon comics app – Toonsutra

    MUMBAI:  In a first for the homegrown comics market, Toonsutra has arrived on the scene as a webtoon comics platform for mobile devices for free download on both iOS and Android devices.

    Toonsutra, a subsidiary of Graphic India, will launch in April to bring Indian audiences hundreds of high quality webtoon formatted comics optimised for mobile devices. The new platform will release new free stories every day from groundbreaking creators and storytellers in India as well as top global comics made available in India and in Hindi and other regional languages for the very first time.

    The Toonsutra app will feature a wide range of content for audiences across superhero, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, Bollywood, mythology, action, and more.

    “Toonsutra will become India’s new storytelling home for disruptive creators across the country to experiment, innovate and create engaging webtoon comic stories for the world,” Graphic India co-founder Sharad Devarajan said. “Webtoon platforms have become an explosive phenomenon across Asia with top webtoon apps cumulatively reaching over 70 million monthly users and over a 100 billion views a year. For the first time, we want to make a webtoon app dedicated for Indians and spark a mobile webcomic revolution.”   

    In addition to comics from around the world, the platform will showcase and promote emerging rising star creators across India and give them a home to tell there stories. Using the medium of comics and webtoons these new voices can express every type of genre and story all with the support, guidance and expertise of Toonsutra's team to make it easy to collaborate with other creators, develop ideas and make those stories a reality.

    On top of showcasing breakthrough Indian talents, Toonsutra will also offer users exclusive original webcomics based on some of the country’s biggest hit properties in film and TV such as the mega-blockbuster film Baahubali, and the recent animated hit streaming series The Legend of Hanuman; as well as new original webtoon comics based on Chakra The Invincible, the Indian superhero created by Stan Lee and Graphic India’s Devarajan.

    Graphic India’s large library of comics will also be adapted into the vertical scroll webtoon reading format bringing their hit properties including, 18 Days: The Mahabharata; the female super-heroine series Devi created by filmmaker Shekhar Kapur as well as other Indian webcomics including, The Sadhu, Mistry P.I., Shadow Tiger, Unholi, Reincarnation Man, Shikari Force, The Mighty Yeti, Dragonfly, Avatarex Destroyer of Darkness, and many more.    

    The Toonsutra app will feature international superhero comics from leading US publisher, Valiant Entertainment bringing their hit characters Bloodshot, Shadowman, X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Archer & Armstrong, Ninjak, Rai and more to Indian audiences in Hindi for the first time.