Indian audio storytelling platform Pocket FM has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year, with AI now powering 93% of its content. The company, which started in 2018 as a platform for serialized audio stories, still relies on human creators for ideas and storytelling, but uses AI to turn those concepts into finished content at scale.
According to co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak, the shift towards AI has made content production significantly cheaper - about 80 times cheaper, to be exact. This has enabled the company to produce a large amount of content, with its more than 550,000 creators now producing about 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content a year. Two years ago, the startup's entire catalog comprised about 100,000 hours of content.
The influx of content has helped Pocket FM improve its ability to retain listeners, with the startup's 12-month revenue retention rate rising to 76% from 44% two years ago. Nayak attributed this in part to having more stories available to match different listener preferences. The platform has overall built a library of more than 770,000 audio series.
The Role of AI in Content Production
AI head Vasu Sharma, a former Meta and Tesla scientist, explained that the startup has trained its own models for tasks such as creative writing and text-to-speech, using years of production data and signals on how listeners engage with stories. The company's approach focuses on building AI tools around the creative process instead of generating content autonomously.
Pocket FM's annualized revenue run rate stood at about $250 million a year ago, before climbing to $430 million in April and $500 million now. The growth came as the company ramped up its use of AI in content production, expanded into markets including the U.K., Germany, and France, and launched user-generated content in the U.S. Some 96 titles on Pocket FM's platform have now generated more than $1 million in revenue each, including 13 that have crossed $10 million.
Pocket FM's parent company, Pocket Entertainment, is now looking to take its 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. The app is currently available only in the U.S. and its content is entirely AI-produced, unlike Pocket FM, where humans remain involved in developing stories.
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