Audio series platform Pocket FM posted a 7.5X rise in revenue to Rs 131.1 crore in the fiscal year ending March 2023.
98% of the company’s total revenue was contributed by operations the same year, this was a 7.6X growth from FY22’s Rs 17 crore.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, Pocket FM is an audio series platform that offers long-form audio content including audio shows, stories, novels, and podcasts. It provides over 100K hours of long-format audio content across audiobooks, shows, stories, novels, podcasts, and knowledge shows.
Founded by Nishanth S, Prateek Dixit, and Rohan Nayak, the platform’s content is available in English and seven Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi. Currently, the platforms claims to have over 15 million monthly active listeners on the app spending an average of over 100 minutes every day. The total monthly audio streaming on the app counts to over 3 billion minutes.
The entertainment firm’s expenses were almost flat with a mere 9% rise to Rs 207 crore from FY22’s Rs 190 crore. FY23 saw employee benefits as the leading expense taking up over 35% of the total expenditure.
While promotional costs took over 34%, legal charges cost close to 5%. This could be attributed to the legal spat Pocket FM had with Kuku FM. The copyright infringement case, that started in the later months of 2022, was settled in January 2023.
The six year old company has raised a cumulative of close to Rs 1700 crore. Its latest round, Series D, scooped up Rs 856 crore led by Lightspeed last month.
While Pocket FM Corp is the largest shareholder of the firm post the infusion of the latest round. Lightspeed and Bennett Coleman & Company Limited were the other major shareholders.
A year prior, Pocket FM secured Rs 130 crore in a debt round led by Silicon Valley Bank.
The audio OTT platform’s losses dropped 56% to Rs 75.7 crore in FY23 as compared to the preceding fiscal’s Rs 171 crore. It also witnessed an improvement in both its EBITDA and ROCE. It currently stands at -50.63% and -158.56% respectively.