India's Pocket FM doubles revenue run rate to $500M as AI powers 93% of audio content

Pocket FM, an Indian audio storytelling platform, has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year, as it increasingly turns to artificial intelligence to produce its content. Co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak told TechCrunch that the shift is central to the company's growth.

According to Nayak, AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM's overall catalog and is used to produce 99% of its new content. That means the bulk of the platform's output is now generated with models rather than relying entirely on manual production.

Pocket FM has not, however, handed creativity over to AI. Nayak said the company still relies on human creators for ideas and storytelling, while using AI to turn those concepts into finished content at scale. "We want to create great IPs that last 100 years, and that needs humans," he said.

Vasu Sharma, the company's AI head and a former Meta and Tesla scientist, told TechCrunch that Pocket FM has trained its own models for tasks such as creative writing and text-to-speech, using years of production data and signals on how listeners engage with stories.

The economics have been a major driver. Nayak said AI has made content production about 80x cheaper, and that 100 hours of content which previously took about a year to produce can now be made in a day.

The jump in output is striking: more than 550,000 creators now produce roughly 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content a year, compared with a total catalog of about 100,000 hours two years ago. Pocket FM has built a library of more than 770,000 audio series.

More content has also improved retention. Nayak said the platform's 12-month revenue retention rate has risen to 76% from 44% two years ago, partly because more stories are available to match different listener preferences. Some 96 titles have now generated more than $1 million each, including 13 that have crossed $10 million.

Starting with India as its primary market, Pocket FM now has more than 250 million listeners across over 20 countries, having expanded into the UK, Germany and France and launched user-generated content in the US. Its annualized revenue run rate stood at about $250 million a year ago, climbing to $430 million in April and $500 million now.

What stands out is that Pocket FM frames AI as a tool built around the creative process rather than an autonomous content engine. Whether that division of labor — humans on ideas, AI on scale — can preserve content quality and IP value as volume grows will determine how replicable the model really is.