When a kid’s doodle can turn into a real cartoon, screen time becomes creative time
When Walt Disney announced a $1bn investment into OpenAI last month, it read almost like a dispatch from the near future – one where stories no longer just play on screens, but pull audiences inside them.
Under the deal, OpenAI’s video model Sora will eventually let fans drop themselves into short clips alongside more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, with some of those fan-made videos even surfacing on Disney+.
The announcement sparked plenty of chatter online. On one side was the promise of AI-powered entertainment built from massive libraries of familiar characters and made for sharing. On the other was a film and television industry still wrestling with what AI could mean for jobs, copyrights, and creative control.
But long before the billion-dollar partnership made headlines, smaller teams were already living in that future. Startups, like cartoon generator Pixley AI, have been using the same generative ideas to build and interact with stories on demand – with creative control, child safety, and parental values sitting front and center of the experience.
From passive consumers to active creators
Pixley’s co-founders, Krish Iyengar and Pranit Agrawal, are two 19-year-olds who have known each other since second grade. They grew up online, learned to code early, and spent their teenage years chasing hackathon wins rather than polishing resumes.
They later landed in top computer science programs – Lyengar at Purdue University, Agrawal at University of California, Los Angeles – but lectures couldn’t compete with the pull of building things together. Eventually, both dropped out to start Pixley.
Pixley’s bet is simple, and especially now. If companies like Disney and OpenAI are using AI to help fans step into existing universes, someone still needs to fix everyday screen time for five-year-olds.
Children aged 2-8 now spend roughly 2.5 to 3 hours a day on screens, with more of that time shifting from traditional TV to algorithm-driven feeds and short-form video. Parents feel uneasy about it, yet they still rely on screens anyway, because the alternatives can be bleak.
“Educational” apps that feel like homework, glossy cartoons that keep kids quiet without teaching much at all, you name it.
Iyengar and Agrawal, however, approached the problem as builders who remembered what actually excited them as kids. Drawing, inventing characters, telling stories, and watching those ideas come alive.
For them, it’s not about creating just another form of content children can consume – but one where they can become active participants along the way.
How it works
With Pixley, a child starts with a drawing or a photo, whether that be a lopsided dragon, a sibling with superhero powers, or a scribbled family dog.
Within seconds, the app turns it into a fully animated character that can star in multiple stories. Parents then describe what they want an episode to focus on – whether that be sharing toys, managing frustration, learning fractions, or exploring space – and Pixley generates a short animated story around that theme, with the child’s own characters at the center.
The magic, as the founders like to point out, isn’t just that AI made a cartoon. It’s that the cartoon already belongs to the child before it starts playing.
Pixley extends that idea with “character calling,” where kids can talk directly to their animated characters in a kind of supervised, endlessly patient FaceTime. They can ask about dinosaurs, kindness, or why math matters – and hear the answers in the voice of a character they drew themselves.
For parents, everything is private, ad-free, and built with child-safety regulations in mind. No autoplay rabbit holes and no data-harvesting side quests.
Proof that AI can power the future of personalised storytelling and screen time interaction
Early traction suggests Pixley’s idea resonates. Within three weeks of launch, Pixley attracted more than 1,000 families across 75 countries on web and iOS. That growth brought familiar startup headaches – compute costs, content moderation, the responsibility of building for children – but also unusual clarity about trade-offs.
From day one, Pixley chose subscriptions over ads. There’s no incentive to keep a child endlessly scrolling, because the business doesn’t depend on it. Instead, success depends on whether families trust the product enough to come back tomorrow.
Backing from Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch brought funding and validation, but throughout all the momentum, the core idea has remained unchanged. Kids should feel like creators, not targets.
In a year dominated by headlines about billion-dollar AI deals and copyright lawsuits, Pixley offers a smaller, stranger counter-image – a child hunched over a tablet, drawing a crooked character that will soon talk back to them about the skills or lessons they’re learning as they grow.
And while Disney is betting that fans want to step into their favorite universes, Iyengar and Agrawal are betting that the next generation would rather build universes of their own – one crayon sketch at a time.
