Pocket FM hits $500M revenue run rate as AI now powers 93% of its audio catalog

Doubling revenue on AI production

Pocket FM, an audio-series platform founded in India, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year, TechCrunch reports. Artificial intelligence now powers 93% of the company's catalog and is behind 99% of its newly released content, according to co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak.

The milestone follows a steady climb: roughly $250 million a year ago, $430 million in April, and $500 million now. Nayak explained to TechCrunch that the company computes this figure by multiplying monthly revenue by twelve, rather than measuring contracted recurring revenue.

Humans supply the stories, AI does the rest

The company, which launched in 2018 as a home for serialized audio fiction, has not removed people from the creative process. Writers and creators still originate the ideas and narratives, while AI systems turn those concepts into finished audio at scale. Nayak argued that franchises built to endure for a century require human authorship at their core.

Vasu Sharma, Pocket FM's AI head and a former scientist at Meta and Tesla, told TechCrunch that the firm trained its own models for creative writing and text-to-speech, drawing on years of production data plus signals from how listeners engage with stories.

The economics behind the shift

Cost was a major driver. Nayak said AI has made production about 80 times cheaper, and that a hundred hours of content — once roughly a year of work — can now be completed in a single day.

Output has scaled accordingly. More than 550,000 creators on the platform now generate around 2.5 million hours of AI-assisted content per year, whereas the entire catalog totaled about 100,000 hours two years ago. The library now spans more than 770,000 audio series.

Retention improved alongside supply. Pocket FM's 12-month revenue retention rate has risen to 76% from 44% two years earlier, a change Nayak partly credited to having enough stories to match varied listener tastes.

Where the money comes from

Pocket FM reports more than 250 million listeners across over 20 countries. The United States, its largest market, grew around 70% over the past year and accounts for about 70% of the run rate, following expansions into the UK, Germany and France and the launch of user-generated content in the US.

Roughly $415 million of the annualized revenue comes from listeners paying to unlock individual episodes, with about $85 million from advertising. Ninety-six titles have each earned more than $1 million, including thirteen that have passed $10 million.

Beyond audio

Parent company Pocket Entertainment is extending the model to new formats. Pocket Saga, a microdrama app launched three months ago and available only in the US, has already reached an annualized run rate of about $15 million, according to Nayak. Unlike the main platform, its content is produced entirely by AI, with successful Pocket FM stories converted into AI-generated video rather than live-action shoots.

The company plans to add at least two more entertainment formats within five years and to license hit stories for books, television and film. It is also in talks with investors; a recent report suggested it is seeking $100 million to $120 million at a valuation near $2 billion. Nayak did not deny the discussions but said there was no urgent need for capital, and that any new round would mainly fund AI investment and additional formats.

Pocket Entertainment says it is profitable with positive cash flow on an adjusted basis, though it declined to disclose profits, margins or cash flow figures. A public listing is not planned within the next 24 months, with options kept open for an eventual listing in India or the US.

Why it matters

Pocket FM is one of the clearest large-scale demonstrations that AI-assisted content can sustain a substantial business built on paying audiences. An 80-fold drop in production costs and the jump from a 100,000-hour catalog to millions of hours per year show how generative AI removes the capacity constraints that once limited media companies, while rising retention suggests listeners are not rejecting machine-finished content when humans shape the underlying stories.

The caveats matter too: the headline number is a run rate rather than contracted revenue, and profitability claims come without detail. The company's two-track strategy — human-led creation on Pocket FM and fully autonomous production on Pocket Saga — is a live experiment in how much human involvement AI-era media actually needs, and its results will be watched closely across the publishing and streaming industries.