Pocket FM hits $500M revenue run rate as AI produces 93% of its catalog
The Indian audio storytelling platform doubled its annualized revenue in a year while shifting nearly all new content production to in-house AI models.
Pocket FM, an Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year. Co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak told TechCrunch that artificial intelligence now powers 93% of the overall catalog and 99% of new content.
The figure stood at roughly $250 million a year ago, climbed to $430 million in April, and reached $500 million now. The company calculates it by multiplying monthly revenue by 12. About $85 million comes from advertising, with the remaining $415 million from users paying to unlock individual episodes.
Production costs down 80x
Nayak said AI made content production about 80 times cheaper: 100 hours of content that once took a year can now be made in a day. AI head Vasu Sharma, previously a scientist at Meta and Tesla, said the company trained its own models for creative writing and text-to-speech using years of production data and listener engagement signals.
More than 550,000 creators on the platform now produce around 2.5 million hours of content per year. Two years ago the entire catalog was about 100,000 hours; the library now holds over 770,000 audio series. The 12-month revenue retention rate rose to 76% from 44% two years ago. Some 96 titles have each earned over $1 million, and 13 of those passed $10 million.
Beyond audio
Nayak said humans remain central to ideas and storytelling: "We want to create great IPs that last 100 years, and that needs humans." The three-month-old microdrama app Pocket Saga, by contrast, is entirely AI-produced and has reached an annualized run rate of about $15 million. It is available only in the U.S.
Pocket FM counts more than 250 million listeners across over 20 countries, with the U.S. accounting for roughly 70% of the run rate. Parent company Pocket Entertainment, based in Bengaluru and Culver City, is in talks with investors and says it has no plan to go public within the next 24 months. Full details at TechCrunch.
The figures line up with the company's own announcement: in a release dated 10 September 2026, Pocket Entertainment said its annual revenue run rate had passed 500 million dollars, growing 70 percent year over year. The company's announcement.
