Pocket FM raises $22.4 million in Series B funding round led by Lightspeed

Audio streaming startup Pocket FM has raised $22.4 million in Series B funding round led by Lightspeed and participation from new investor Tanglin Venture Partners and existing investors including Times Group.

With this, the Gurugram-based startup has raised a total of $28.6 million across three rounds of fundings to date.

The company plans to use the funds raised to scale up its operations, strengthen its community of audio content creators, invest in technology to provide better recommendations and expand its presence across geographies.

Founded in 2018 by Rohan Nayak, Nishanth Srinivas, and Prateek Dixit, Pocket FM provides more than 100,000 hours of long-format audio content across audiobooks, shows, stories, novels, and podcasts in English and seven Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi.

The service is available through an annual subscription priced at Rs 399 per year. It also offers a free ad-supported version with limited content catalog.

The company claims to have clocked 40 million downloads and 3 billion monthly listening minutes, with users spending more than 110 minutes on a daily basis on the app. It aims to surpass 100 million users in the next six months.