India’s homegrown webtoon comic app Toonsutra announced that in just a few months it has firmly established itself as the number one comic app in India in both the Apple and Android stores. It has maintained this position 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 plus mobile youth market. The premium webtoon comics app caters to Indian audiences with Hindi, Tamil and Telugu language content offerings.
The company has already locked up partnership deals with global publishers and creators to bring over 550 plus titles and 250,000 episodes of content into local Indian languages, in easy-to-read vertical scroll format optimised for mobile.
Toonsutra is founded by veteran media entrepreneurs, Sharad Devarajan who is the company’s executive chairman, and Vishal Anand who is the CEO.
Devarajan is also the founder/CEO of 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 Baahubali: Crown of Blood with SS Rajamouli; created and produced The Legend of Hanuman series with Disney+Hotstar.
Anand is a serial digital media entrepreneur and was formerly Dailyhunt CPO 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 300 million 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 in easily snackable mobile short episodes,” said 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,” said Anand. “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.”
Toonsutra has partnered with Valiant Comics, Webtoon Factory, Kenaz, Archie Comics, Boom! Studios, Top Cow Productions, Liquid Comics, and numerous others.
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 (Crunchyroll co-founder); Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed partner); Kevin Lin (Twitch co-founder); Patrick Lee (Rotten Tomatoes co-founder); Holly Lui (Kabam co-founder); Benjamin Grubbs (CreatorPlus co-founder); Steve Chung (fmr. CEO of Americas, CJENM); and others.
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 US$60 billion by 2030, making it one of the highest growing new categories for media and content.
