Pocket FM Doubles Revenue Run Rate to $500M as AI Powers Content Production

Indian audio entertainment platform Pocket FM has doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million over the past year, driven by the aggressive deployment of artificial intelligence across its production workflows. Co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak revealed that AI now powers 93% of Pocket FM's catalog and helps produce 99% of its new releases. Despite the reliance on automation, Nayak stressed that human creators remain fundamental to the platform's vision, serving as the originators of story concepts and intellectual property that the company hopes will endure. According to Vasu Sharma, Pocket FM's head of AI and a former researcher at Meta and Tesla, the company trained in-house models for creative writing and text-to-speech using historical engagement metrics and production archives. Economics served as a major catalyst for the shift: Nayak stated that AI reduced content production costs by approximately 80 times, compressing what used to be a year-long process to generate 100 hours of audio into a single day. The company's network of over 550,000 creators now outputs roughly 2.5 million hours of AI-assisted content annually across a library exceeding 770,000 series, driving its 12-month revenue retention rate up to 76% from 44% two years ago.