After completing its fourth year of operations in September 2022, the company released a performance update for the period October 2021-September 2022.
The company has exceeded $25 million ARR (Annualised Revenue Run-rate), as recorded until October 2022, stimulated by the introduction of micropayment model and advertising solutions, the company claimed in a statement.
“As we successfully discovered the content monetisation model in the audio space, our revenue has grown 10X to $25 million ARR in just 12 months,” Rohan Nayak, cofounder & chief executive officer, Pocket FM said.
He added that with the continued momentum and expected growth targets, the company foresees another four times growth in revenue during its fifth year of operations, “thus entering into the $100 million ARR club within five years of our operations”.
The platform said it has strengthened its content offerings with 733 audio series which resulted in a 270% increase in audio series — a fictional long-form audio storytelling category.
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“As we scale up to emerge as the global audio series platform, we will continue to strengthen our content library, and nurture and grow our creator community across the world to keep our listeners entertained,” Nayak said.
The category has dominated consumption on the platform, registering over 90% of the time spent.
It said its creator community has grown to over 500,000 worldwide, and the listener community has increased to over 80 million.
Streaming on Pocket FM has increased by 75%, surpassing 40 billion minutes in its fourth year. Over 80% of its listeners belong to the 15-35 years age group. The majority in this category listen to romance, suspense, thrillers and family drama.
“Besides these popular genres, Pocket FM has seen an encouraging consumption pattern in the fantasy segment, which has witnessed a 4X growth in listening minutes,” the company said.
Pocket FM is also doubling investments in its AI and ML capabilities, concentrating on building an advanced personalised content recommendation engine to drive higher user engagement and retention.
It is also building cutting-edge generative AI capabilities across NLP, text2speech and image, which will drive faster production and content testing. Further, it is ramping up its AI capabilities for automated content moderation and quality testing.
The company
raised $22.4 million in Series B in December 2021 and
$65 million in Series C in March 2022. Pocket FM has raised a total of $93.5 million.
