Audio content platform Kuku FM gets investment of around ₹148 crore led by PUBG producer Krafton
Audio content platform Kuku FM has secured a $19.5 million (approximately ₹148 crore) investment in a Series B funding round led by South Korean gaming giant and PUBG and BGMI maker, Krafton. The company primarily allows its users to create, post and distribute audio content to a wider audience. It claims that it currently has over 30,000 content creators on its platform and over 6 million paying users. Kuku FM currently offers over 150,000 hours of content on its platform across five languages including audiobooks, stories, book summaries, courses and podcasts in five languages including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati.
Some of the company's existing investors such as 3one4 Capital, Vertex Ventures and IndiaQuotient also participated in this investment round. Interestingly, after this new investment, the total investment received by Kuku FM so far has reached $25 million. With this new capital, the company says it will use it to broaden its language offering and strengthen content creation. Kuku FM was started in the year 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goel.
Its offerings include various categories including fiction and nonfiction audiobooks, self-help education titles, entertainment, news, mythology, spirituality, learning and inspiration, stories, poems and jingles. But it gets even more interesting as just a few days ago Pocket PM, considered to be the biggest rival of Kuku FM, secured an investment of $65 million in its Series C funding round. In such a situation, the claim of both the companies in the market can be interesting in the coming time. Speaking on the new investment, Lal Chand Bisu, CEO, Kuku FM said; “We have seen a massive consumption of audio content among users in our country, with 70% of the users coming from Tier 2 cities. With this pace, we expect to reach around 10 million active paying customers by the end of this year and 50 million paying users by 2025.”
