Cheap synthetic voice is proving to be one of the decade’s most consequential production tools, and an Indian app few outside its home market have heard of is among the earliest beneficiaries. Pocket FM says its annualised revenue run rate now sits at $500M, roughly twice last year’s figure, after shifting the bulk of content creation to AI.
AI now drives 93% of the catalogue and 99% of new content, co-founder and chief executive Rohan Nayak said. The company still leans on human creators for ideas, then uses its own models to turn concepts into finished audio.
Economics explain the shift. AI has cut production costs about 80-fold, Nayak said, and 100 hours of content that once took a year can now be made in a day. Roughly 550,000 creators produce about 2.5 million hours of AI-assisted content annually, against a catalogue of 100,000 hours two years ago.
The library now holds more than 770,000 audio series. AI head Vasu Sharma, formerly of Meta and Tesla, said the startup trained models for creative writing and text-to-speech using years of production data and listener engagement signals.
Retention has followed content volume. Pocket FM’s 12-month revenue retention rate has climbed to 76% from 44% two years ago. The platform says 96 titles have each generated more than $1M, with 13 crossing $10M.
The run rate stood at about $250M a year ago and $430M in April. Expansion into the UK, Germany and France, plus user-generated content in the US, has widened the base. Nayak calculates the figure by multiplying monthly revenue by 12.
