India's Pocket FM Doubles Revenue Run Rate to $500M as AI Powers 93% of Audio Content
Pocket FM, the Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year, driven by an accelerating shift toward artificial intelligence in content production.
AI now underpins 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 milestone arrives as generative AI makes deeper inroads into content production across the entertainment industry in 2026.
Humans Still Drive the Creative Vision
Despite the heavy reliance on AI, Pocket FM—which launched in 2018 as a platform for serialized audio stories—continues to depend on human creators for ideas and storytelling, using AI to transform those concepts into finished content at scale.
"We want to create great IPs that last 100 years, and that needs humans," Nayak told TechCrunch.
The company's current approach centers on building AI tools around the creative process rather than generating content autonomously. Vasu Sharma, Pocket FM's head of AI and a former Meta and Tesla scientist, said the startup has trained its own models for tasks including creative writing and text-to-speech, drawing on years of production data and signals about how listeners engage with stories.
Dramatic Efficiency Gains
Economics have played a central role in Pocket FM's AI push. According to Nayak, the technology has made content production roughly 80 times cheaper. He noted that 100 hours of content—which previously took about a year to produce—can now be created in a single day.
The AI-driven approach has also fueled a sharp increase in output. Pocket FM's more than 550,000 creators now produce approximately 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content annually, Nayak said, compared with a total catalog of about 100,000 hours just two years ago. The platform has built a library of more than 770,000 audio series overall.
Improved Retention Through Content Volume
This influx of content has strengthened Pocket FM's ability to retain listeners. Nayak said the company's 12-month revenue retention rate has climbed to 76%, up from 44% two years ago—a trend he attributes in part to having more stories available to match diverse listener preferences.