Indian audio storytelling platform Pocket FM has said it doubled its annualized revenue run rate to about $500 million over the past year as the company leaned heavily on artificial intelligence to produce content.
According to co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak, AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM’s total catalog and is used to produce 99% of new content. Founded in 2018 as a serialized audio-story platform, Pocket FM still relies on human creators for ideas and story development, while using AI to convert those concepts into finished episodes at scale.
“We want to create great IPs that last 100 years, and that needs humans,” Nayak told TechCrunch.
Building AI tools around the creative process, not replacing creators
Pocket FM’s approach focuses on creating AI tools that support the creative process rather than fully autonomous content generation. Vasu Sharma, Pocket FM’s head of AI and a former scientist at Meta and Tesla, told TechCrunch the company trains its own models for tasks such as creative writing and text-to-speech, using years of production data and listener engagement signals.
Economics have been a major driver: Nayak said AI has made the company’s content production about 80 times cheaper. He added that 100 hours of content that previously took roughly a year to produce can now be created in a day.
More content, better retention
The shift to AI has dramatically increased Pocket FM’s output. Nayak said the platform’s more than 550,000 creators are now producing about 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content per year; two years ago the entire catalog was roughly 100,000 hours. Pocket FM now claims a library of more than 770,000 audio series.
That content influx has helped retention: the company’s 12-month revenue retention rate rose to 76% from 44% two years ago, which Nayak partly attributes to having more stories to match diverse listener preferences.
Financials and market footprint
Pocket FM’s annualized revenue run rate was about $250 million a year ago, climbed to $430 million in April, and is now about $500 million. The company calculates this figure by multiplying monthly revenue by 12 rather than relying on contracted recurring revenue, Nayak explained.
Growth has come as the company ramped up AI use in production, expanded into markets including the U.K., Germany and France, and launched user-generated content in the U.S. Some 96 titles on the platform have now generated more than $1 million each in revenue, including 13 that have crossed $10 million.
Starting with India as its primary market, Pocket FM now has more than 250 million listeners across over 20 countries. The U.S. market, which grew around 70% over the past year, is its largest market and accounts for about 70% of its annualized revenue run rate.
Approximately $85 million of Pocket FM’s annualized revenue comes from ads, while the remaining roughly $415 million comes from users paying to unlock individual episodes, Nayak said.
Beyond audio: Pocket Saga and format expansion
Pocket FM’s parent, Pocket Entertainment, is moving the AI-driven content model beyond audio. Its three-month-old microdrama app Pocket Saga has reached an annualized revenue run rate of about $15 million, Nayak told TechCrunch. Pocket Saga is currently available only in the U.S. and its content is entirely AI-produced, unlike Pocket FM where humans still participate in story development.
The company is also repurposing successful Pocket FM audio stories into AI-generated videos for Pocket Saga, with no traditional live-action production involved.
Pocket Entertainment plans to enter at least two more entertainment formats over the next five years and aims to license successful stories into books, television and films.
Funding, profitability and IPO plans
Bengaluru- and Culver City, California-based Pocket Entertainment is in talks with investors about raising fresh capital; a recent report said the startup was seeking $100 million to $120 million at a valuation of about $2 billion. Nayak did not deny the discussions but said the company is not under immediate pressure to raise capital. He declined to disclose how much it might raise or at what valuation, noting that any new round would primarily be used to invest more in AI and new entertainment formats.
Pocket Entertainment said it is profitable and generating positive cash flow on an adjusted basis, but declined to disclose exact profit, cash flow figures, or margins.
An initial public offering is not planned in the next 24 months, Nayak told TechCrunch, though the company is keeping options open for a future listing either in India or the U.S.
Conclusion
Pocket FM’s experience illustrates how integrating AI into the production pipeline can dramatically increase output and lower costs while human creators remain central to developing long-lasting intellectual property. That combination of scale, economics and expanding markets has helped the company reach its reported $500 million annualized revenue run rate.
