Audio-streaming startup Pocket FM bags $65 million Series C funding

(Left to right) Pocket FM founders Nishanth KS, Prateek Dixit and Rohan Nayak.

Audio-streaming startup Pocket FM has raised $65 million in Series C funding led by Goodwater Capital, South Korean internet giant Naver and existing investor Tanglin Venture Partners.

This fundraising comes nearly three months after it raised $22.4 million in Series B funding in December last year. To date, the startup has raised a total of $93.6 million from investors such as Lightspeed, Tencent, Times Group, and Tanglin Venture Partners.

The Gurugram-based startup plans to use the funds raised to strengthen its offering, expand to new languages, investing in artificial intelligence capabilities, scale its community of audio content creators and help them monetise on the platform.

"This is a validation of our market leadership and trust in our execution capabilities. Audio consumption has seen exponential growth over the last year, and we are on a mission to build the largest audio OTT platform" said Pocket FM CEO Rohan Nayak.

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Founded in 2018 by Nayak, Nishanth Srinivas, and Prateek Dixit, Pocket FM says it provides more than 100,000 hours of long-format audio content across audiobooks, shows, stories, novels, podcasts and knowledge shows in English and seven Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi. It claims to have a creator community of over 50,000 professional user-generated content (PUGC) writers and voice artists.

The service is available through an annual subscription priced at Rs 399 per year. It also offers a free ad-supported version with limited content catalogue. In December, the company had said that users spend more than 110 minutes on a daily basis on the app.

"In addition to audio entertainment, we saw 12x growth in consumption of self-help books, audio courses. Users are looking for high quality knowledge content to up-skill themselves. With this investment, we are looking to grow our creator community further, and target 5 million paying users in the next 12 months" said Pocket FM cofounder Nishanth KS.

Scott Shiao, Director, Investment at Goodwater Capital said, “Pocket FM empowers audio creators around the world in crafting the best long-form audio content, from writing to voice acting, while also providing a channel for consumers to find and discover that content. We look forward to helping Pocket FM to continue to grow its platform.”