Pocket FM: How an audio entertainment startup is building a global business

Pocket FM is awash with funds and listeners, but this is the result of a long and iterative process of finding great stories, finding ways to market them, and finding people who would pay for them

About six years ago, when Harsha Kumar of venture capital firm Lightspeed was two years into investing, video content was a big business around the world and growing bigger, but more so in India, riding on the data democratisation done by Reliance Jio.

But Kumar, two years into investing, was also struck by the rise of podcasts in the western countries. She also noted that while people were consuming podcasts, they were not paying for them. The content format was proven, but monetisation was not.

“Monetisation of a platform is a product problem,” Kumar tells Business Standard.

So, she looked