Startup Deep Dive : Kuku FM — still loss-making, now filing for a $1.8 billion IPO

Kuku FM has never turned a profit. Its net loss widened to ₹153 crore in FY25 even as revenue nearly tripled to ₹242 crore (about $25 million), and the company still spent more on marketing that year – ₹285 crore – than it earned in total revenue.

Yet in June 2026 the same company filed a confidential draft prospectus with India’s markets regulator, hunting a public listing that could value it at up to ₹15,000 crore ($1.8 billion, as reported), roughly 62 times that FY25 revenue. This is the story of how a podcast app that failed within three months of launch became one of the more closely watched IPO candidates in Indian consumer tech.

Quick facts

What they do

Kuku FM sells audio. Specifically, it sells serialised audio drama, self-help and business audiobooks, mythology and crime fiction, and short courses, mostly in Hindi and regional Indian languages, to listeners who commute, cook, or work with their hands and want something in their ears rather than their eyes. The core product is a mobile app with a monthly or annual subscription; most content is locked after the first episode or two. Around 70 percent of its users come from Tier 2 cities and smaller, as per the company’s own disclosures reported by Inc42 in March 2023 – this is not a metro, English-first audience, it is the “Bharat” market that most subscription entertainment products in India have struggled to convert into paying customers. Beyond the original Kuku FM app, the company now runs Kuku TV, a short-form vertical video app for two-to-three-minute “micro-drama” episodes launched in late 2024, and Guru, a smaller edutainment and skilling product, as reported by Entrackr in June 2026 citing the company’s confidential IPO filing.

The origin

Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal and Vinod Kumar Meena met as students at IIT Jodhpur, as confirmed by the institute’s own alumni network. Before Kuku FM, Bisu had already built one company inside that ecosystem: EasyPrep, an entrance-exam preparation platform incubated at IIT Jodhpur that was acquired by the edtech company Toppr, where Bisu went on to work as a lead engineer. That edtech detour matters, because it is where the founders’ original insight came from: millions of Hindi-speaking Indians wanted the kind of long-form, self-improvement and educational content that English-speaking podcast listeners in the West already had, and almost none of it existed in an Indian language. Books were expensive and required literacy and time most target users did not have. Audio, cheap to produce and consumable while doing something else, looked like the format that could close that gap. The founders launched Kuku FM in 2018 with that thesis: reinvent India’s oral storytelling tradition – kissa-goi – for a smartphone and a pair of earphones.

The struggle years

The first version of that thesis did not work. Kuku FM launched as a conversational podcast app, copying the Western format almost directly. Within about three months, the founders concluded it was not going to work in India: listeners had little cultural exposure to talk-show-style podcasting, and the format did not travel. The team then tried user-generated short-form audio, hoping to crowdsource content the way early YouTube crowdsourced video. That did not stick either. It took repeated experiments before the founders landed on serialised, episodic audio drama – audio soap operas released in instalments, built to bring listeners back for the next chapter the way a soap opera or a web series does.

Even after the format was right, the economics were not. In FY22, Kuku FM’s revenue from operations was just ₹4.4 crore, as reported by Entrackr in September 2023. The company then went through a phase of expensive, unprofitable scaling: in FY23, revenue jumped 9.3 times to ₹41.2 crore, but the net loss reached ₹116.5 crore and the company was spending ₹4.02 for every rupee of revenue it earned, according to the same Entrackr analysis of its regulatory filings. That is a burn rate that could not continue indefinitely on venture funding alone. Layered on top of the financial strain has been a running legal fight with rival Pocket FM. Pocket FM sent Kuku FM a cease-and-desist notice in November 2023 alleging its shows had been copied; in July 2025, Pocket FM took the dispute to the Delhi High Court, and Justice Saurabh Banerjee restrained Kuku FM from releasing further episodes of five specific shows pending the hearing, with Pocket FM seeking damages of about $10 million over what it called repeated copying of its titles, thumbnails and episode formats, as reported by Bar and Bench and Medianama in July 2025.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point in Kuku FM’s numbers sits between FY22 and FY24. Krafton, the South Korean gaming company behind PUBG, led a $19.5 million Series B round in March 2022 alongside existing backers 3one4 Capital, Vertex Ventures and India Quotient, as reported by Entrackr and Business Standard at the time. That capital came right as the serialised-drama format was proving itself and funded an expansion into new regional languages beyond Hindi. The payoff showed up quickly in the top line: revenue from operations went from ₹4.4 crore in FY22 to ₹41.2 crore in FY23 to ₹87.9 crore in FY24, a roughly 20-times increase in two years, according to Entrackr’s reporting of the company’s filings. Inc42 reported in March 2023 that when Kuku FM pushed into Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, those languages grew at roughly 60 percent month-on-month, about double the rate of its existing Hindi user base – evidence that language expansion, not just marketing spend, was compounding the growth.

The money behind it

Kuku FM has raised more than $156 million since 2018 across eight disclosed rounds, according to Entrackr’s October 2025 reporting. The shape of that funding has three distinct chapters. Krafton led the $19.5 million Series B in March 2022, bringing both capital and, as a gaming and content company itself, credibility in built-for-engagement product design. Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal’s Fundamentum Partnership and the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the World Bank’s private-investment arm) then co-led a $25 million round in September 2023, which pushed the company into profitability-minded scaling and cross-language expansion; Google was also an investor in this period, holding a stake reported at under 2 percent. The most recent chapter is an $85 million round in October 2025 led by Granite Asia (formerly GGV Capital), joined by Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, IFC, Paramark, Tribe Capital India and Bitkraft Ventures, per TechCrunch’s coverage of the deal. That round included secondary sales in which Google exited its stake entirely.

Valuation is where the picture gets murkier, and the two main sources genuinely disagree on the reference point. TechCrunch reported on 15 October 2025 that the new round valued Kuku FM at “more than double its previous valuation to around $500 million.” Entrackr’s own report on the same deal, published a day later, described the company’s prior valuation (from the 2023 round) as roughly $185 million – a starting point that would put the new post-money figure closer to $370-400 million rather than $500 million. Both figures are reported, not confirmed by the company, and this piece gives both rather than picking one. What is not contested is the direction of travel: seven months later, in June 2026, Entrackr and Inc42 both reported that Kuku had filed a confidential draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with SEBI seeking to raise ₹2,500-3,500 crore ($261-366 million) in an IPO that could value the company at up to ₹15,000 crore ($1.8 billion), with Kotak Mahindra Capital, Jefferies, JM Financial and Axis Capital as bankers.

How it makes money

The business model is a straightforward subscription funnel, not advertising. New users get a taste of a show for free, then hit a paywall; at the pricing the company advertised around its 2023 fundraise, a monthly plan cost ₹99 and an annual plan ₹999, undercutting a print book or an audiobook import by a wide margin. Money in is subscription revenue, recognised largely through app-store billing on Android and iOS. Money out is split between two large buckets: content and marketing. Kuku FM has said it pays out roughly ₹40 crore (about $4.5 million) a month to its creator base, which Inc42 reported at around 50,000 creators in 2023, with 60 percent of them women; this is the direct cost of keeping a 60,000-plus-hour content library growing every week. The bigger and more volatile cost line is user acquisition: marketing and advertising spend was ₹285 crore in FY25, or about 70 percent of total expenses that year, up from ₹102 crore in FY24, as reported by Entrackr in December 2025. The part people typically get wrong is assuming Kuku FM is a “podcast app” competing on original talk content; in practice it is closer to a scripted-content studio that increasingly uses generative AI – TechCrunch reported in October 2025 that the company estimates 70-80 percent of its production workflow, covering titles, plots, scripts, dialogue and thumbnails, is now AI-assisted, with human writers, voice actors and editors still doing the actual recording and refinement. That shift is what lets the company keep adding shows in nine languages without a proportional increase in headcount, which TechCrunch put at around 150 employees as of October 2025.

The numbers

Kuku FM’s revenue has compounded fast, and so have its losses, at least through FY25. All figures below are from the company’s regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr, except FY26, which is a company-reported figure tied to its confidential IPO filing and reported by Entrackr in June 2026; treat it as unaudited-at-writing until the DRHP itself is public.

Two things stand out. First, the loss did not grow in lockstep with revenue – the FY25 loss grew 59 percent while revenue grew 175 percent, and the company’s own cost-per-rupee-earned metric improved from ₹2.27 in FY24 to ₹1.70 in FY25, as reported by Entrackr, meaning the business was becoming more efficient even while still deeply loss-making. Second, the reported jump to over ₹1,400 crore in FY26 – roughly seven times FY25 revenue – is the number an IPO-bound company has every incentive to present in the best light, and it has not yet been verified against an audited, publicly filed prospectus.

Where the money comes from

Kuku FM does not publish a segment-wise revenue split by product or geography, so the more useful lens is where its users and growth come from. Geographically, around 70 percent of users are from Tier 2 cities and beyond, per the company’s disclosures reported by Inc42 – this is a genuinely different customer base from the metro-heavy user bases of most subscription-video platforms in India. By language, Hindi content still accounts for the majority of the catalogue and of listening, but regional languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali – have been growing roughly twice as fast as Hindi on a month-on-month basis, per Inc42’s 2023 reporting, suggesting the next leg of growth is more likely to come from the south and east of India than from repeat Hindi-belt users. The surprise for anyone assuming this is purely an “audiobooks” business is how much of the company’s recent growth story, per its own October 2025 investor round, is being told through Kuku TV, the short-video micro-drama product that Entrackr reported had crossed 200 million downloads and was producing more than 150 original shows a month by mid-2026 – a format closer to a vertical soap opera than to audio at all, and one aimed squarely at the same short-attention-span audience that made Chinese micro-drama apps a global export story.

The risks

Three risks stand out, and none of them is hypothetical. The first is litigation: the Pocket FM dispute is not a one-off cease-and-desist but a pattern going back to at least November 2023, and the July 2025 Delhi High Court order shows a willing court can and will stop Kuku FM from releasing specific shows mid-dispute, which is a direct threat to a content pipeline that depends on constant new releases to hold subscribers. The second is the cost structure of growth itself: marketing consumed 70 percent of total expenses in FY25, and if the company cannot keep converting that spend into paying subscribers at a stable or improving cost, the “nearing breakeven” story it is telling ahead of an IPO gets harder to sustain without either raising prices or cutting content investment. The third is the company’s growing dependence on generative AI for content creation, at a reported 70-80 percent of the production workflow: this is efficient today, but it exposes Kuku FM to two moving targets at once – evolving Indian and international rules on AI content labelling and copyright, and the risk that AI-assisted storytelling becomes easy for every competitor to copy, eroding the very differentiation that got Kuku FM here.

The takeaway

The lesson in Kuku FM’s story is not “regional-language content wins” – plenty of regional apps have failed. It is that a product-market fit found through repeated, humbling failure (podcast, then user-generated audio, then finally serialised drama) can be more durable than a product-market fit found on the first try, because the founders learn exactly why the earlier versions did not work before they scale the one that does. The company then compounded that fit with unusually heavy, and unusually well-timed, capital from strategic backers who each solved a specific problem – Krafton for engagement design and capital at the format-proving stage, Fundamentum and IFC for scale-up capital and governance ahead of growth, Granite Asia for late-stage capital ahead of an IPO. Founders building anything for India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 audiences should take from this that the format matters more than the category, and that it can take years and multiple wrong turns to find it.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Kuku FM and when?

Kuku FM was founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal and Vinod Kumar Meena, all IIT Jodhpur alumni, as confirmed by the institute’s alumni network.

How much has Kuku FM raised, and at what valuation?

The company has raised more than $156 million since 2018, according to Entrackr’s October 2025 reporting. Its most recent, $85 million round in October 2025 was reported by TechCrunch at a valuation of around $500 million, though Entrackr’s account of the same deal implies a lower prior base valuation of roughly $185 million; both figures are reported, not company-confirmed.

Is Kuku FM profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹153 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹242 crore, per Entrackr’s analysis of its regulatory filings. The company has told media it is “nearing breakeven” in FY26 as part of its IPO filing, but that figure is not yet independently verified.

Is Kuku FM planning an IPO?

Yes. Entrackr and Inc42 reported in June 2026 that the company had filed a confidential draft prospectus with India’s markets regulator, SEBI, seeking to raise ₹2,500-3,500 crore at a valuation of up to ₹15,000 crore ($1.8 billion, as reported).

Who are Kuku FM’s main investors?

Key backers include Krafton, Fundamentum Partnership (co-founded by Nandan Nilekani), the International Finance Corporation, and Granite Asia (formerly GGV Capital), alongside Vertex Growth Fund, Paramark, Tribe Capital India and Bitkraft Ventures. Google was an earlier investor and exited its stake in the October 2025 round.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Kuku FM’s scale mounts 9X in FY23, splurges Rs 95 Cr on advertising”, September 2023
• Entrackr, “Kuku FM reports Rs 88 Cr revenue in FY24; spends Rs 100 Cr on marketing”, October 2024
• Entrackr, “Kuku FM reports Rs 240 Cr revenue in FY25; spends Rs 285 Cr on marketing”, December 2025
• Entrackr, “Kuku FM raises $85 Mn from Granite Asia and others”, October 2025
• Entrackr, “Kuku files confidential DRHP for Rs 3,500 Cr IPO”, June 2026
• Inc42, “Indian Startup IPO Tracker 2026”, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “How Kuku FM Cracked The Differentiation Code In The Crowded Online Audio Market”, March 2023
• TechCrunch, “India’s Kuku snags $85M as mobile content wars intensify”, 15 October 2025
• BusinessToday, “Kuku FM Raises $19.5 mn in Series B funding led by KRAFTON Inc.”, March 2022
• Bar and Bench, “Delhi High Court restrains Kuku FM from streaming 5 shows after Pocket FM alleges IP violation”, July 2025
• Medianama, “Delhi HC Stops Kuku FM From Streaming Shows Amid Legal Battle”, July 2025
• IIT Jodhpur Alumni Network, profile of Kuku FM founders Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal and Vinod Kumar Meena

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