The financial year ending 2018 will always remain fundamental when somewhere down the line we track the economic growth of India. In this year, India saw approximately 240 million new internet users. This amount of growth has never been observed before. It was pretty clear from the data available that Indians were spending a lot of time using the Internet. Thus, a big marketplace has opened for online platforms. There are three content formats people consume every day and these are – text, audio and video. While a lot of improvement has already been made in the video and text format, huge steps need to be taken to enhance the content provided through audio format.
The same gap was identified by IIT Jodhpur alumna Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena, and Vikas Goyal who founded a non-music audio platform KukuFm in 2018. It is India’s leading audio content platform that creates, markets, distributes, and produces exclusive premium audio content in the form of audiobooks, stories, summaries, courses, and more categories via its mobile app and website available on Android and iOS. It provides content in more than 5 languages and across 50+ genres for all user segments ranging from age group 6 to 60+.
Recent In News
KukuFm, an audio entertainment platform is all ready to diversify its offerings, bringing categories like comics, videos, animation, and text under its wing according to its co-founder Lal Chand Bisu.
First Traction
The B2C-modelled media and entertainment sectored KukuFM secured its first two fundings as seed rounds in September 2018 and June 2019 respectively. The angel investor in the startup is Farooq Adam Mukadam. The audio platform raised a total of $543K in these two fundings.It initially started only with the podcast content.
Year-over-Year Analysis
In FY19-20, the valuation of the firm at that time was $15.4M. It has raised $5.9M by then with a Series A funding of $5.5M secured on 4 January 2020. The gross revenue was ₹20L and it incurred a net loss of ₹7.7Cr this year.
For FY21, the company’s valuation as recorded in Q4 was $49.8M. However, the online media startup didn’t raise any funds this year. The growth rate observed was 850% with the overall revenue increasing to ₹1.9Cr. The Mumbai-based firm recorded a loss of ₹15.5Cr in 2021.
For the next fiscal year, the B2C-modelled firm’s valuation rose to $56.6M. It managed to secure a funding of $41.3M in Series B this year. The total funding raised by the startup till this year was $47.3M. The total revenue was ₹4.8Cr approximately and the growth rate observed was 152%. The losses almost tripled this year with the net loss recorded at ₹52.2Cr.
For FY23, the total revenue skyrocketed to ₹48.8Cr and the growth rate observed was 916%. The company was valued at $119M in this financial year. The firm didn’t manage to raise any funds this year. The Mumbai-headquartered startup recorded a net loss of ₹116.6Cr in 2023
For the financial year ending 31 March 2024, the firm managed to secure $25M in funding in Series C which was led by Vertex Ventures, Fundamentum and IFC. With this, the company’s valuation has surged to $178M. KukuFm is yet to officially file its FY24 report with the registrar of companies.
Expansion
As of now, the vernacular audio content startup claims to have 2.5M subscribers with the number of content creators breaking the 50 thousand mark. It also reports that 60% of its content creators are women. The firm plans to use the latest capital infusion in content and programming infrastructure. The company is aiming to increase the depth of content in various religion-based languages of India.
Competition
KukuFm has various and some well-established alternatives in the name of Spotify India, Headfone, Deezer, Khabri, and Pocket FM. Currently, it is ranked 5th among its competitors. Approximately, 91% of the market share in this industry is owned by Spotify India. KukuFm though has one of the largest paid subscribers in this sector, overpowering JioSaavan and Gaana in this term.
