Pocket FM Says AI Powers 93% of Its Catalog as Run Rate Reaches $500M

Pocket FM says its annualized revenue run rate has doubled to $500 million in a year as AI came to power 93% of its audio catalog. The company’s bet is not simply on generating more stories: it is separating the human work of creating ideas from the machine work of turning them into finished entertainment at far greater volume.

AI is used to produce 99% of Pocket FM’s new content, according to co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak. Yet the company says its more than 550,000 creators still supply ideas and storytelling, while AI turns those concepts into finished work. Pocket FM has trained its own creative-writing and text-to-speech models on production data and signals from listener engagement.

Two versions of an AI studio

That division of labor distinguishes the established audio service from Pocket Saga, the parent company’s three-month-old microdrama app. Pocket FM presents AI as a production system built around human-originated stories. Pocket Saga is entirely AI-produced, including videos adapted from successful Pocket FM audio stories, without traditional live-action production.

The economics are central to the contrast. Nayak said AI has made Pocket FM’s content production about 80 times cheaper and cut the time to make 100 hours of content from roughly a year to one day. The company’s creators now produce about 2.5 million hours of AI-powered content each year.

More supply, stronger retention

Pocket FM links that increase in available stories to better listener retention. Its 12-month revenue retention rate rose to 76% from 44% two years earlier, Nayak said, as the service added more titles for different preferences. The platform has more than 250 million listeners in over 20 countries; the U.S. accounts for about 70% of its annualized revenue run rate.

A smaller test beyond audio

Pocket Saga has reached an annualized revenue run rate of about $15 million, according to Nayak, though it is available only in the U.S. Its early result is far smaller than Pocket FM’s reported $500 million run rate, but it is a test of whether the company’s low-cost, high-output system can move into video without traditional live-action production.

Pocket Entertainment also said it is profitable and has positive adjusted cash flow, but it did not disclose profit, cash flow, or margins. That leaves unclear how much of the reported production savings reaches the bottom line. The company is discussing a potential funding round, while saying it faces no immediate pressure to raise capital.