Liang Chenqi, a former ByteDance executive, has raised an eight-figure sum for Pinecone Moment, an app that would let anyone generate comic stories of four to six pages from images and text prompts, Bleeding Cool reports. His new start-up, Dongnian Yongxian, is building it under the tagline of letting users be the cartoonist of their own lives.
The company calls it a user-generated storytelling platform built around recording personal moments and long-term companionship, as opposed to AI comic tools sold as utilities. Keeping characters consistent across panels, let alone pages, has so far held AI comics back, and has fuelled accusations against human artists suspected of using it.
Liang led the early build of a ByteDance product, and his technology chief once ran recommendation systems there. The firm says it has over 60 staff from ByteDance, Tencent and other big tech companies. It has not said what data its comics will be built on.
The raise comes as market research puts AI-generated comics at about $1.52 billion in 2025, up from $1.15 billion, and forecasts $4.6 billion by 2029, led by North America and growing fastest in Asia-Pacific. Bleeding Cool points to earlier moves such as Pocket Toons and Dashtoon's deal with Korea's webtoon industry association, and makes no secret of its contempt for the trend, which the research credits to demand for personalised and interactive stories and to social media.
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