Pocket FM ropes in former Netflix executive to lead AI push

Pannagadatta K Shivaswamy has over 14 years of experience, with stints at Netflix, LinkedIn and AT&T Research.

Pocket FM has roped in former Netflix executive Pannagadatta K Shivaswamy to lead the audio series platform's artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, the company said on August 3.

In his role as director of artificial intelligence, Shivaswamy will spearhead the startup's AI strategy and oversee the integration of voice assistants and content analytics, the company said.

"His extensive AI experience and deep understanding of the audio entertainment industry resemble our stature of work as we continue to innovate and enhance our platform," said Pocket FM co-founder Prateek Dixit.

Shivaswamy will also play a key role in advancing Pocket FM's generative AI capabilities and work closely with the engineering and content teams to develop and deploy advanced AI models that will change the way users discover and engage with audio content, the company said in a statement.

Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that learns from past data. It creates or generates new content which can be a text, an image or even a computer code.

Before joining Pocket FM, Shivaswamy was serving as a machine learning (ML) research scientist at Netflix for nearly seven years. He worked on multiple projects related to recommender systems and personalisation for various product applications of the video streaming service.

Shivaswamy has over 14 years of experience with stints at LinkedIn and AT&T research. He holds six US patents and specialises in large-scale machine learning and deep learning, focusing on personalisation, recommender systems, ranking, and search, the company said.

"His extensive AI experience and deep understanding of the audio entertainment industry resemble our stature of work as we continue to innovate and enhance our platform," said Pocket FM co-founder Prateek Dixit.

The appointment comes a week after Pocket FM elevated Anurag Sharma as chief financial officer, responsible for the startup's financial operations.

Founded in 2018 by Dixit, Rohan Nayak, and Nishanth Srinivas, Pocket FM claims to provide more than 100,000 hours of long-format audio content across various genres such as romance, horror, thriller, sci-fi, fiction, and mythology in English and several Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi.

The company claims to have over 80 million listeners globally who are spending an average of over 150 minutes on a daily basis. It claims to have surpassed $25 million ARR (annualized revenue run-rate) in October 2022.

Pocket FM counts Lightspeed, Tencent, Tanglin Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, Times Group, and South Korean internet giant Naver among its investors.

It has raised $109.5 million to date, which includes a $ 16 million debt financing in May 2023 and a $65 million funding round in March 2022.