Audio series platform Pocket FM said it recorded a revenue of Rs 1,051.97 crore in FY24—six times the revenue it generated in the previous fiscal, while its losses narrowed by 21% to Rs 165 crore. In FY24, the company spent Rs 1.16 for every rupee earned, while it had spent Rs 2.18 for the same a year ago. In FY23, the company recorded a revenue of Rs 176.36 crore on a loss of Rs 208 crore. 

“We have more than 65% gross margin—the highest for any entertainment business. Our core markets India and the US are operationally profitable, while Europe, where we have launched recently, is yet to turn profitable. So, profitability is more of a choice right now, rather than an inevitability,” its co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak said in an interview to a TV channel. 

The manifold rise in revenue is largely from an increase in its microtransaction-led subscription revenue, which rose to Rs 934.73 crore in FY24 from Rs 160.05 crore, a year ago. Besides this, ad revenue rose seven times to Rs 89.34 crore from Rs 12.5 crore in FY23.

Pocket FM’s revenue includes India and all its global markets such as the US, Europe, and Latin America.

Microtransactions are sachet payments made to access individual content, unlike a subscription model where there is a fixed monthly or annual charge that users need to pay for the app. This strategy has helped Pocket FM post a 75x increase in revenue over the past 24 months and a 9x increase in paying users, the company told FE in an interaction in June.

“We’ve seen audio series establish itself as a new entertainment category this year. We saw more and more users move to audio series as a 24×7 entertainment format, where users have binged for over 120 minutes every day,” Nayak added.

On Wednesday, the company said its platform has registered over 45 million microtransactions and has 200 million overall users. Lately, it has also been using AI tools to cut the cost of content production and said over 40,000 AI audio series have contributed to over Rs 25 crore in revenue in FY24. In total, Pocket FM offers 75,000 audio series on its platform.

Earlier this year, it raised $103 million in a Series D round led by Lightspeed and with participation from Stepstone Group, while its valuation nearly doubled to about $750 million.