Two years ago, Pocket FM’s entire library came to about 100,000 hours. Its creators now produce roughly 2.5 million hours of AI-assisted audio a year, and the business that grew out of that output doubled.
Annualized revenue run rate hit $500M, co-founder and chief executive Rohan Nayak said, with AI behind 93 percent of the catalog and 99 percent of new content. The financial effect is stark. Production costs fell about 80 times, and material that once took a year to finish, 100 hours of it, now takes a day.
What the company did not automate is the idea. Writers and creators still invent the stories, and Pocket FM’s own models, trained on years of production data and listening signals, turn those concepts into finished episodes and voices. Nayak told TechCrunch that stories meant to last 100 years need humans. AI head Vasu Sharma, previously of Meta and Tesla, describes the tooling as built around the creative process rather than around replacing it.
More titles appear to keep listeners around. Retention over 12 months climbed to 76 percent from 44 percent. About 96 series have each earned more than $1M, with 13 of those past $10M, and the platform counts more than 250 million listeners across 20-plus countries. The United States is the largest market, at roughly 70 percent of revenue.
The parent company, Pocket Entertainment, has already taken the model to video. Pocket Saga is its microdrama app. It is three months old, uses no human production at all, and sits at an annualized rate close to $15M.
