GoKawiilPocket FM, an Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year as it increasingly turns to artificial intelligence to produce its content.
AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM’s overall catalog and is used to produce 99% of its new content, co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak said in an interview.
The shift comes as generative AI makes deeper inroads into content production. However, Pocket FM, which started in 2018 as a platform for serialized audio stories, still relies on human creators for ideas and storytelling, while using AI to turn those concepts into finished content at scale.
“We want to create great IPs that last 100 years, and that needs humans,” Nayak told TechCrunch.
Pocket FM’s current approach focuses on building AI tools around the creative process instead of generating content autonomously. AI head Vasu Sharma, a former Meta and Tesla scientist, told TechCrunch that the startup has trained its own models for tasks including creative writing and text-to-speech, using years of production data and signals on how listeners engage with stories.
Economics have played a key role in Pocket FM’s push toward AI. The technology, Nayak said, has made its content production about 80 times cheaper. He added that 100 hours of content, which previously took about a year to produce, can now be made in a day.
The move toward AI has also led to a notable increase in the amount of content Pocket FM produces. Its more than 550,000 creators are now producing about 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content a year, Nayak said. Two years ago, the startup’s entire catalog comprised about 100,000 hours of content. The platform has overall built a library of more than 770,000 audio series.
The influx of content has helped Pocket FM improve its ability to retain listeners, Nayak said, noting that the startup’s 12-month revenue retention rate has risen to 76% from 44% two years ago. Nayak attributed that in part to having more stories available to match different listener preferences.
Pocket FM Co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak Image Credits:Pocket FM
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