Kuku, the Indian storytelling platform backed by Google, has raised $85 million in recent financing to scale up its audio and video content offerings amid growing competition in the South Asian mobile content market.
The Series C round, led by Granite Asia (formerly GGV Capital), values Kuku at greater than double its previous valuation to around $500 million, Kuku founder and CEO Lal Chand Bisu confirmed to TechCrunch. Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, IFC, Paramark, Tribe Capital India and Bitkraft also participated in the round.
The latest round also included secondary transactions in which some of Kuku’s original investors partially exited the company, selling their shares to recent investors. This includes Google, which held lower than 2% of the shares and is now exiting the company entirely, Bisu told TechCrunch.
India, a country with over a billion web subscribers and around 700 million smartphone users, is seeing a huge increase in digital content consumption, driven by extremely low data costs and seamless micropayments. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently noticed this 1GB of knowledge in India costs lower than a cup of tea. The country’s government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – a system that allows fast digital payments between bank accounts – has also made digital transactions easy and widely available. This combination has made the Indian market attractive to global players such as Instagram and YouTube, while also giving local platforms such as Kuku a competitive advantage in reaching mass audiences through content in local Indian languages.
In 2024, digital media overtook television for the first time to grow to be the largest segment of the Indian media and entertainment sector, generating 32% of total revenues – 802 billion kilos (roughly $9.13 billion) based on EY report (PDF) published in March. The report also projects that digital media will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.2% from 2024 to 2027.
This growth potential has led players like Kuku to experiment with recent formats, including recently popularized microdramas — short, serialized video stories designed to be viewed on mobile devices. The format has caught on among Indian start-ups and it even attracted the attention of world platformswith Meta recently launched his own series of micro-dramas in the country, aimed at Generation Z audiences.
Founded in 2018, Kuku first gained popularity among Indian content consumers with its audiobook offering through Kuku FM. It has since expanded its product offering and now operates two flagship platforms: Kuku TV, which presents long-form stories in the type of short episodes in a vertical format, and Kuku FM, which focuses on primarily audio programs. The platforms provide content in over eight Indian languages and have crossed 10 million paid subscribers, the startup said, up from two million at the time of its last round in 2023.
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The startup has seen a twofold increase in average revenue per user and a 10x increase overall since its last funding, Bisu said, without disclosing actual financial figures. He noted that about 80% of subscribers come from non-metropolitan cities.
Bisu said about 60% of Kuku’s subscriber base is male and 40% is female, adding that almost all of the subscribers are in the age group of 25 to 35 years.
Kuku offers access to its platforms through paid subscription plans, including £199 (about $2) per thirty days, £499 (about $6) per quarter, and £1,499 (about $17) per yr. Bisu said the quarterly plan is the hottest among users.
Consumers spend an average of 100 minutes a day on Kuku’s platforms, the founder said, adding that greater than 90% of the startup’s subscribers remain energetic from month to month.
Kuku sources content through third-party content creators and currently employs roughly 10,000 creators. Bisu said greater than 50% of them come from small towns and non-metro cities. He noted that the startup pays its creators about 400 million kilos (about $4.5 million) per thirty days.
According to Appfigures data shared with TechCrunch, the Kuku FM app leads in terms of downloads and consumer spending among the startup’s portfolio, which incorporates Kuku TV, Kuku Bhakti (a religious app with stories based on Hindu mythology) and StoRizz (focused on small-scale micro-dramas).
In September, Kuku recorded a total of over 229 million downloads, including 122 million for Kuku FM and 88 million for Kuku TV. Kuku apps generated greater than $4 million in consumer spending, with $2.8 million generated by Kuku FM and $1.3 million by Kuku TV, based on Appfigures.
In 2025 alone, the startup saw over 134 million downloads, up 533% year-over-year, and consumer spending was $1.9 million, up 156%, based on Appfigures data.
Bisu told TechCrunch that in terms of consumption, Kuku TV is larger than Kuku FM and accounts for over 60% of total usage.
The Bengaluru-based startup built its GenAI studio to streamline content creation by leveraging AI tools for multilingual translation and on-demand ad production. The studio includes software from AI firms including OpenAI and ElevenLabs, as well as some internal Kuku tools.
“We are shifting more focus to our tools because now we have a lot of our own data. We train these models on our own data, and then the results are actually much better than with external tools,” Bisu told TechCrunch.
The startup doesn’t use GenAI to create content itself, as a substitute using it to assist creators create audio and video stories for their platforms. The tools help generate titles, storylines, scripts, dialogues and thumbnails, while the actual audio and video production is done manually, Bisu said.
He added that 70% to 80% of Kuku’s work is done using GenAI, while the remaining 20% is still done manually.
Without naming specific people, Bisu said the startup plans to make use of the recent funding to enhance its content by attracting celebrities, including film and television personalities.
Still, Kuku faces stiff competition from local rivals, particularly Pocket FM, which offers similar audio and visual storytelling formats. Pocket FM has filed multiple copyright infringement lawsuits against Kuku. Most recently, the Delhi High Court restrained Kuku since releasing recent episodes of the five controversial programs.
Bisu said Pocket FM’s lawsuits were aimed at distracting investors. “Every time we fundraise, they [Pocket FM] go to some court and file a lawsuit. So it isn’t the first time,” Bisu told TechCrunch.
He added that Kuku has a dedicated team that manually checks all uploaded content for copyright infringements. The startup has also developed tools to detect whether creators are uploading copyrighted or third-party content.
“Some of the money [from this round] we also intend to enhance these tools – we plan to take a position in technology that may have the option to acknowledge when a creator is using another person’s work,” Bisu said.
Compared to Pocket FM, Kuku saw more downloads but saw much lower revenue from in-app purchases, Appfigures data shows. While India accounts for the majority of Kuku’s downloads and earnings, Pocket FM generates 82% of its downloads from India but gets 98% of its revenue from outside the country, based on Appfigures.
While Kuku saw significant growth in each downloads and consumer spending in 2025, Pocket FM saw a 21% year-over-year decline in downloads to 38 million, but a 61% increase in consumer spending to $100 million, based on Appfigures data.
That said, Kuku plans to make use of the latest funding to enhance artificial intelligence and data infrastructure, grow its workforce of 150 by hiring recent technology and content talent, and deepen and scale creator partnerships in India and beyond. The startup is already testing its offer in the Middle East and the USA, and in 2026 it plans to launch operations in the USA.