The idea for Pocket FM arrived on a crowded Gurugram train. Rohan Nayak's job meant three to four hours of daily travel between Gurugram, Delhi and Noida, and he looked around at people staring into their phones with nothing to listen to but music. There was Netflix for video and Saavn and Gaana for songs. For stories, nothing.
Nayak had come to products through an unusual route: a couple of years in investment banking, then a role as product lead at a mobile tech start-up, Cube26. He is reported to be an IIT Kanpur graduate. In 2018 he met Nishanth KS and, with Prateek Dixit, started Pocket FM. A seed round of ₹4.61 Cr from Lightspeed and the Times Group followed that December.
A seed round of ₹4.61 Cr from Lightspeed and the Times Group followed that December.
The early months were rough. The team first thought of a podcast platform, then realised podcasts lacked the daily pull, so it switched to episodic audio fiction, closer to a TV show than a talk. But nobody came. The app drew about 10,000 downloads in its first 18 months. "We had a near-death moment at Pocket FM even before properly starting up," Nayak has said, crediting his co-founders and what he called naive optimism for getting through. Nishanth has described the first year and a half as constant experiments and quick pivots.
The turn came from outside. In the 2020 lockdown, people were stuck at home with time and phones. Downloads climbed to 1 crore in about three months and Pocket FM became India's top audio entertainment app. The team also dropped the subscription model, which Indian users resist, for a micro-payment one: the first episodes free, then a small charge for each next episode.
Then came the quiet part of the story. In 2022 Pocket FM entered the US. By 2025 only around 15% of users were outside India but they produced about 70% of revenue. That is how a company with a ₹1,052 Cr FY24 became one that says it hit ₹1,768 Cr in FY25, a figure the company has not audited publicly. In March 2026 Nayak said annualised revenue passed $400M.
The cost of the growth has been visible. FY24 still showed a net loss of ₹165 Cr, nearly nine of every ten rupees of revenue came from micro-payments and subscriptions, and Pocket TV, its video experiment, was shut even as micro-dramas boomed in India. Rivals like Kuku FM and Pratilipi keep the pressure on.
The lesson for a founder is how little the first version mattered. Pocket FM needed two years, around ten pivots by one account, and a pandemic, but it survived because the team kept changing the product while the idea stayed the same.