Pocket FM launches online novel reading platform Pocket Novel, to invest $40 million

People spent over 100 minutes reading novels on Pocket Novel every day during the testing period. Popular genres include Romance, Drama, Suspense, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi.

Pocket FM on February 20 announced the launch of its online novel reading platform, Pocket Novel, as the audio series platform looks to expand its offerings to other entertainment categories and formats.

This announcement comes after a year-long beta phase, during which time the company claims to have attracted over 150,000 writers. Some of the top-performing writers have even earned incomes exceeding $2,500 every month, it said.

The Bengaluru-based startup now plans to invest $40 million towards this product as it aims to clock $100 million in annualised revenue run rate (ARR) globally by 2025.

In 2023, readers made over 1 million transactions on the platform for purchasing the entire novels or certain chapters, written by its community of writers, the company said.

With this launch, Pocket FM will compete with its cross town rival Pratilipi, a digital storytelling platform that counts Krafton, Tencent and Nexus Venture Partners among its investors.

It's worth noting that Pratilipi has also forayed into audio entertainment in recent years, following its acquisition of podcast platform IVM Podcasts in November 2020.

Creating an IP playbook

Pocket FM stated that this launch is a key step towards developing its intellectual property (IP) playbook.

"We are building an ecosystem that shapes the essence of entertainment which specialises in discovering and distributing unique and unheard stories. These are adaptable across formats and geographies, creating a robust model with millions of audiences" said Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak in a statement.

Nayak said the company plans to use learnings from its audio series growth to "cultivate a dynamic entertainment ecosystem".

"Our IP creation engine is designed to produce and disseminate content across diverse categories," he said.

Pocket FM aims to build a community of 1 million writers and strengthen its library to 2 million novels by 2025. During the beta phase, more than 2 percent of novels garnered over 500,000 reads, and over 5 percent exceeded 100,000 reads, the company said.

Read: Pocket FM's India arm revenue jumps to Rs 131 crore in FY23; loss reduces by 56%

Pocket FM said that people spent over 100 minutes reading these novels on its platform every day during the testing period. Popular genres include Romance, Drama, Suspense, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi.

Founded in 2018 by Nayak, Prateek Dixit, 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 130 million listeners globally who are spending an average of over 115 minutes every day.

In December, Pocket FM said it clocked over 20 million transactions in 2023, closing the year with 2.5 million monthly transactions. The audio content was streamed for over 75 billion minutes during the year, with an average monthly streaming of over 6 billion minutes.

Pocket FM counts Lightspeed, Tencent, Tanglin Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, 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.