Streaming Start-up Pocket FM Announces $65 Million Series C Funding

The audio-streaming startup plans to expand services to new languages, scale its community of audio content creators and help boost monetisation initiatives through the platform.

Indian OTT platform, Pocket FM announced funding of $65 million in a Series C round led by Goodwater Capital, South Korean internet giant Naver and existing investor Tanglin Venture Partners.

This funding has come three months after it raised $22.4 million in a Series B round in December last year. PocketFM has raised a total of $93.6 million from investors such as Lightspeed, Tencent, Times Group, and Tanglin Venture Partners to date.

Marketing Technology News: Dialpad and Sacramento Kings Davion Mitchell Partner to Further Community Collaboration

The Gurugram-based startup will use the funds raised to strengthen its core product and service offering, expand to new languages, invest in artificial intelligence capabilities and scale its community of creators.

There has been a surge in demand for audio consumption in the recent years, with a growing demand for better OTT capabilities across different media.

PocketFM was founded in 2018 by Rohan Nayak, Nishanth KS and Prateek Dixit. The platform provides over 100k hours of streaming content in audio formats via audiobooks, shows, stories, novels, podcasts and more. The platform caters to various regional languages of the area including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and more.

PocketFM has grown over thelast few years, to now boast of a creator community of over 500k writers and voice over artists.

PocketFM offers annual subscriptions priced at Rs. 399/- per year and also offers free ad-supported formats. With the surge in demand for different kinds of audio content including self-help books, platforms like PcoketFM will see exponential growth in the years to come. Users today are always on the lookout for easy to consume content that can boasts of high quality knowledge and features, aspects that can help them boost their own skills on the go.

As the demand for long-form audio content evolves it will be interesting to see how market dynamics influence demand and trends.

Marketing Technology News: Bubblehouse brings NFTs to New York Fashion Week