Kuku FM Success Story: From Three Farmers’ Sons To A $550 Million Audio Empire

The first paying subscriber Kuku FM ever had was a grain merchant from Rajasthan. He had signed up for the platform’s audio series on Chanakya, the ancient Indian strategist and royal advisor. When the Kuku FM team reached out to understand why he had paid, he told them something they have not stopped talking about since: he used the lessons from the Chanakya programme to inform his daily business decisions.

That customer, a small-town trader in rural India paying for intellectual content on his phone, was everything the three co-founders of Kuku FM had bet on and everything that conventional wisdom in India’s technology industry had told them would not happen. At the time, the received wisdom was clear: the “Bharat audience” consumes content but does not pay for it. Building a subscription business around tier 2 and tier 3 India was considered, at best, a long shot.

7 years later, Kuku FM has more than 10 million paying subscribers, ₹242 crore in operating revenue for FY25, a $550 million valuation, and is preparing to list on the public markets.

From Farming Villages To IIT Jodhpur

All three co-founders of Kuku FM, Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal, and Vinod Kumar Meena, grew up in small villages in Rajasthan, within roughly 100 kilometres of each other, in families that had no obvious path to the technology industry. Bisu and Goyal’s fathers were farmers. Meena’s father worked for the central government, and Vinod spent stretches of his childhood moving across the country before returning to his village for the harvest season. The internet, as Vikas Goyal has noted in interviews, was an alien word in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the parts of Rajasthan they came from.

All three won admission to IIT Jodhpur, studying computer science and engineering. They went on to work as software engineers at Toppr, the ed-tech platform, where they built their first venture together: EasyPrep, a competitive exam preparation startup that Toppr eventually acquired. It was a modest exit rather than a transformative one, but it gave the trio a working knowledge of content, subscriptions, and the behaviour of Indian learners that would directly shape what came next.

The idea for Kuku FM began forming around 2018. Bisu had become an avid podcast listener, using audio to fill the dead time of commuting and doing chores with content that felt genuinely valuable. He wanted to create the same experience for Indians who were not fluent in English, the language that dominated almost all high-quality non-fiction audio content globally at the time. The three founders identified what they called a “content gap” for regional language speakers: millions of aspirational Indians in tier 2, tier 3, and tier 4 cities were hungry for self-improvement, financial literacy, motivational content, and storytelling, but were effectively locked out of the best material available because it existed only in English.

Audio, they concluded, was the right medium. Not just because of smartphones and cheap mobile data, but because of something older and more deeply rooted: India’s centuries-long tradition of oral storytelling. Kissa-Goi, the art of the travelling storyteller, had carried culture, wisdom, and entertainment across the subcontinent long before the printing press arrived. Audio was not a new consumption habit for India. It was a native one.

The Wrong Format, Then The Right One

Kuku FM launched in June 2018 with a format modelled on Western podcasting. It did not work. Indian listeners, largely unfamiliar with the long-form conversational podcast format that had become mainstream in the United States and Europe, did not engage the way the founders expected. The assumption that what worked for English-speaking Western audiences would translate directly to Hindi-speaking Indian ones turned out to be wrong.

The pivot came through experimentation. What the founders discovered, through testing and iteration, was that serialised, long-form audio storytelling, content structured like a multi-episode series that listeners would come back to repeatedly, resonated far more strongly with their target audience than standalone podcast episodes. It mapped more naturally onto how Indian audiences had always consumed stories, in chapters, with continuity, building characters and narratives over time.

Kuku FM rebuilt its content strategy around this format, commissioning and producing serialised audio dramas, audiobooks, motivational series, and educational content in Hindi and other regional languages. The Chanakya series, whose listener became the platform’s first paid subscriber, was an early example of the format working exactly as intended: content specific enough to feel purposeful, structured enough to create habit, and valuable enough that someone in rural Rajasthan decided it was worth paying for.

Breaking The “Indians Won’t Pay” Assumption

The decision to move from a free app to a paid subscription model was, by the founders’ own account, the most consequential and most contested decision in Kuku FM’s history. Every piece of conventional wisdom in India’s internet industry at the time argued against it. Consumer internet companies had historically treated the “Bharat audience” as an audience to be monetised through advertising, not subscriptions. The assumption was not just that rural and semi-urban Indians were price-sensitive, which they are, but that they would not pay for content specifically, no matter how good it was.

Kuku FM disagreed. The platform introduced its subscription model and waited. Sixteen months later, it crossed one million paying subscribers, blowing past even the founders’ most optimistic internal targets.

“When we first decided to switch from a free app to a paid subscription model, there was plenty of apprehension,” Lal Chand Bisu has recalled. “The conventional wisdom was that the Bharat audience doesn’t pay for content. 16 months after launching our subscription offering, they crossed one million paying customers.”

That milestone was, by Bisu’s own description, his most memorable day at the office in Kuku FM’s five-year journey to that point. More than any funding announcement or product launch, one million paying subscribers from non-metro India was proof that the entire founding thesis was correct.

Building The Business

Kuku FM’s content library has grown to more than 150,000 hours of audio across more than 10 Indian languages, spanning genres including business and self-help, personal finance, history, religion, entertainment, fitness, and original audio drama. The platform operates a freemium model: select content is available free to encourage discovery and habit formation, while full access requires a paid subscription, available at approximately ₹99 per month or ₹899 per year, making it one of the more affordable content subscriptions available in India’s OTT landscape.

The platform has also introduced Kuku Coins, a micro-transaction mechanism that allows more casual listeners to unlock individual episodes or series rather than committing to a full subscription, a model designed specifically for the first-time digital spender who is ready to pay something but not yet ready to commit to a recurring subscription.

Content on the platform spans commissioned originals, licensed audiobook adaptations, and creator-uploaded content, giving Kuku FM both the exclusive depth of a studio model and the breadth of a creator marketplace. The company has also moved into celebrity audio shows, a format that uses the recognition of well-known voices to expand the platform’s reach into mainstream audiences who might not otherwise seek out a subscription audio app.

Funding: From Seed To Series C

Kuku FM’s capital history spans 3 institutional rounds, with a fourth major infusion in late 2025 that set up its IPO run. The company raised a Seed round in February 2020, followed by a $19.5 million Series B in March 2022 led by Krafton, the South Korean gaming company behind PUBG, alongside 3one4 Capital, Vertex Ventures, and India Quotient. The Series B was notable for bringing in a gaming major as a lead investor, reflecting the content and engagement parallels between gaming and serialised audio that Krafton had identified as strategically relevant.

In October 2025, Kuku FM closed an $85 million Series C led by Granite Asia, formerly GGV Capital, with participation from Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, IFC, Paramark Ventures, Tribe Capital India, and Bitkraft Ventures. Of the $85 million total, $50 million came from primary capital injection and the remainder from secondary share sales. The round valued Kuku FM at $550 million post-money, with total funding raised across the company’s history standing at over $150 million. Krafton, Vertex Ventures, and The Fundamentum Partnership hold the largest institutional stakes, at 10.17%, 11.12%, and 12.79% respectively.

The Revenue Picture: 175% Growth, Widening Losses

Kuku FM’s financial trajectory through FY25 tells the story of a company choosing aggressive market capture over near-term profitability, a sequencing that will be familiar to anyone who has followed India’s major consumer internet companies through their pre-IPO phases.

Operating revenue surged 175% year-on-year to ₹242 crore in FY25, up from ₹88 crore in FY24 and ₹41 crore in FY23, a near-tripling in a single year driven entirely by subscription revenue with no advertising component in the top line. Total income, including ₹16 crore in other income and interest, stood at ₹258 crore for the year.

Total expenses more than doubled to ₹411 crore. Advertising and marketing, the single largest cost head, accounted for nearly 70% of total expenditure at ₹285 crore, up almost three times from ₹102 crore in FY24, as the company invested heavily in subscriber acquisition ahead of its IPO. As a result, net loss widened 59% to ₹153 crore in FY25 from ₹96 crore in FY24. On a unit economics basis, Kuku FM spent ₹1.70 to earn every rupee of revenue in FY25, a meaningful improvement from ₹2.27 in FY24, suggesting that the underlying economics of the business are improving even as the absolute loss number grows.

Kuku TV: From Audio To Micro-Dramas

In early 2025, Kuku FM launched Kuku TV, a short-form video OTT platform built around micro-dramas: serialised, episodic stories told in two to three minute vertical video segments, designed specifically for mobile viewing. The format has its origins in China’s duanju market, now valued at approximately $7 billion globally, and has been spreading rapidly across Asian markets as a distinct entertainment category that sits between traditional OTT series and short-form social video.

Kuku TV’s launch was immediately consequential. Within four months of its debut, it had become the number one app on India’s App Store, ranked among the top five Android apps globally, and held the title of India’s most downloaded app for 30 consecutive days. The platform’s success transformed Kuku FM’s positioning from a pure audio company into what it now describes as a full-stack storytelling platform, offering both long-form audio for commuting and learning, and short-form video for entertainment, within a single ecosystem built around regional language storytelling.

The Series C fundraise was partly framed around exactly this expansion, with the company positioning the micro-drama format as both a significant standalone opportunity and a way to cross-sell subscribers between Kuku FM and Kuku TV, deepening engagement and improving lifetime value across the combined platform.

The IPO On The Horizon

Kuku FM is actively preparing for a public market listing that would mark one of the most significant IPOs in India’s consumer internet calendar. The company has shortlisted Kotak Mahindra Capital, Axis Bank, and Morgan Stanley as investment banks to manage the offering, with reports indicating a target raise of up to ₹3,000 crore through a mix of fresh issue and offer for sale. The listing, if it proceeds on the timelines being reported, would give Kuku FM a public market valuation test of its $550 million private round figure, at a moment when the company is still loss-making but growing revenues at a pace that the public markets for consumer internet companies have historically been willing to price at a premium.

The Market They Are Riding

Kuku FM operates in a market with multiple structural tailwinds behind it. India’s audio streaming market is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 14% through 2030, driven by cheap mobile data, rising smartphone penetration in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, and a growing willingness among Indian consumers to pay for digital content subscriptions following the maturation of the OTT video market. The micro-drama segment adds a second growth vector, one that several major platforms including WinZO, Zupee, and international players are now moving into, meaning Kuku TV’s first-mover advantage in India may narrow faster than the audio business’s did.

Kuku FM’s direct competitors include Pocket FM, which operates a broadly similar serialised audio model, alongside Audible‘s India presence and ShareChat‘s audio features. In the micro-drama segment, Kuku TV competes with international apps including ReelShort while newer Indian entrants prepare to enter. The competitive intensity the company faces heading into its IPO is meaningfully higher than it was at the time of its Series B, which is precisely the dynamic driving the ₹285 crore marketing spend that dominates its FY25 cost base.