Abu Dhabi’s ADIA explores funding in India’s Pocket FM, sources say

Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to again Pocket FM in a big new spherical of funding, two sources aware of 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 just lately securing about $100 million in a separate spherical of funding from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, the sources mentioned, requesting anonymity as the main points usually are not but public.

TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Enterprise Companions engaging to invest in Pocket FM last year. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s talks with ADIA and closure of its latest spherical haven’t been beforehand reported.

The funding deliberations observe a fast-paced income development on the Indian startup, which provides serialized fiction and non-fiction content material spanning genres like romance, self-help and motivation. Its annualized income runrate in direction of the top 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 Instances Web amongst its backers — had publicly set a aim 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, reducing large-check sizes to late-stage startups resembling PhonePe, Lenskart, and Pharmeasy.

Pocket FM’s enlargement into the U.S., and providing prospects 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 provide customers the selection to pay just for content material they like reasonably than all the library.

This strategy has allowed the startup to supply free entry to episodes each 24 hours, with a payment 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 each day on the platform, TechCrunch beforehand reported.

The startup introduced final month that it’s going to 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.