Audio streaming platform Pocket FM has announced its international expansion by entering the US market. It also said it had crossed $25 million in annual revenue run rate as of October, stimulated by the introduction of micropayments and advertising solutions.
Pocket FM is doubling investments in its AI and ML capabilities, concentrating on building an advanced personalised content recommendation engine to drive higher user engagement and retention, said the company.
It is also building cutting-edge generative AI capabilities across NLP, text2speech, and image, which will drive faster production and content testing. Further, it is ramping up its AI capabilities for automated content moderation and quality testing.
The startup said with the introduction of micro-payment, the platform has registered 10 times revenue growth during the fourth year of operations, with over 500,000 monthly transactions.
Rohan Nayak, Co-founder & CEO, Pocket FM, said, “As we successfully discovered the content monetisation model in the audio space, our revenue has grown 10 times to $25 million ARR in just 12 months. With the continued momentum and expected growth targets, we foresee another 4 times growth in our revenue during our fifth year of operations.”
As the platform scale up to emerge as the global audio series platform, we will continue to strengthen our content library, and nurture and grow our creator community across the world to keep our listeners entertained, he added.
The audio series platform said it has strengthened its content offerings with 733 audio series. This it said has resulted in a 270 per cent increase in audio series — a fictional long-form audio storytelling category that has dominated consumption on the platform, registering over 90 per cent of the time spent.
Pocket FM raised $22.4 million in Series B in December 2021 and $65 million in Series C in March 2022. The company has raised a total of $93.5 million.