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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 informed 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 not too long ago securing about $100 million in a separate spherical of funding from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, the sources stated, 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 progress on the Indian startup, which affords serialized fiction and non-fiction content material spanning genres like romance, self-help and motivation. Its annualized income runrate in the direction of the top of final 12 months had exceeded $160 million, TechCrunch beforehand reported, a six-to-seven instances improve over a 12 months in the past.
ADIA didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, whereas Pocket FM stated 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 big decline in large-scale funding rounds final 12 months as outstanding crossover funds, together with Tiger International and SoftBank, decreased their investments in India and different markets, whereas many well-known India-focused funds shifted their consideration to backing early-stage startups, Bain stated 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, reducing large-check sizes to late-stage startups reminiscent of PhonePe, Lenskart, and Pharmeasy.
Pocket FM’s growth 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 somewhat than your complete library.
This strategy 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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