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Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to again Pocket FM in a big new spherical of funding, two sources conversant in the matter advised TechCrunch, because the Indian audio-storytelling platform makes deeper inroads within the U.S.
The talks for the brand new spherical, which have been ongoing for greater than a month, follows Pocket FM lately securing about $100 million in a separate spherical of funding from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, the sources mentioned, requesting anonymity as the small print will not be but public.
TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Enterprise Companions partaking to spend money on Pocket FM final 12 months. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s talks with ADIA and closure of its current spherical haven’t been beforehand reported.
The funding deliberations observe a fast-paced income development on the Indian startup, which gives serialized fiction and non-fiction content material spanning genres like romance, self-help and motivation. Its annualized income runrate in the direction of the tip of final 12 months had exceeded $160 million, TechCrunch beforehand reported, a six-to-seven occasions enhance over a 12 months in the past.
ADIA didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, whereas Pocket FM mentioned it refrains from commenting on market speculations.
Pocket FM — which additionally counts Tencent, Tanglin and Occasions Web amongst its backers — had publicly set a purpose of reaching an ARR of $100 million by 2023-end.
Picture credit: Bain
Indian startups skilled a major decline in large-scale funding rounds final 12 months as distinguished crossover funds, together with Tiger International and SoftBank, lowered their investments in India and different markets, whereas many well-known India-focused funds shifted their consideration to backing early-stage startups, Bain mentioned this week.
A number of sovereign funds, together with ADIA, Temasek, GIC, Qatar Funding Authority, ramped up the tempo of their investments final 12 months, chopping large-check sizes to late-stage startups equivalent to PhonePe, Lenskart, and Pharmeasy.
Pocket FM’s enlargement into the U.S., and providing clients a non-subscription, pay-as-you-go providing has confirmed particularly profitable. Pocket FM operates on a freemium mannequin, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to offer customers the selection to pay just for content material they like slightly than the complete library.
This method has allowed the startup to supply free entry to episodes each 24 hours, with a price for extra content material. Since early 2022, the platform has employed a micro-transaction mannequin, enabling customers to buy cash in native forex to redeem for episodes past the free quota. On common, listeners spend over 110 minutes day by day on the platform, TechCrunch beforehand reported.
The startup introduced final month that it’ll make investments $40 million to develop its on-line studying platform Pocket Novel. Greater than 90,000 writers had signed as much as the app in lower than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.
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