KukuFM Raises $85 Million: Building India’s First Full-Stack Entertainment Platform in a Fast-Compounding Digital Economy

The milestone signals the coming of age of India’s digital storytelling economy, where platforms built on strong engagement and user trust are emerging as category leaders.

KukuFM has raised $85 million in a Series C round led by Granite Asia, with participation from Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, IFC, Paramark Ventures, Tribe Capital India, and Bitkraft Ventures. The round values the company at about $500 million, marking one of the largest recent raises in India’s consumer internet sector.

The round underscores the strength of KukuFM’s operating model, which has compounded growth, engagement, and retention quarter after quarter. Over the past three years, KukuFM has quietly built one of India’s most monetisable digital platforms. By building patiently across audio and video formats, KukuFM has become a bellwether for India’s regional storytelling economy. Its growth has been built on consistent usage, engagement, and retention across millions of daily listeners and viewers.

In a market defined by user depth rather than user acquisition, the platform’s trajectory captures how India’s entertainment and learning audiences are evolving: local in language, mobile in behaviour, and value-conscious in spending.

The Journey

Founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Kumar Meena, and Vikas Goyal, KukuFM began as an audio-first app, bringing long-form storytelling to regional languages. Over time, it expanded into a multi-format platform spanning audio, video microdramas, and short learning capsules, each designed to fit within the brief windows of daily life such as commutes, chores, or late-night downtime.

Over the past three years, the company’s growth has accelerated steadily, with monetisation and engagement compounding quarter after quarter. KukuFM’s expansion has been swift but built on solid fundamentals. KukuFM’s audience base has expanded 4x since early 2024, from about 2 million to 10 million+ active paid users, alongside steady improvements in acquisition efficiency. Each cohort is more engaged and more valuable, signalling a platform that is deepening usage as it expands reach.

KukuFM’s revenue model reflects the diversity of its audience. Its subscription-first core ensures predictability, while microtransactions create access pathways for millions of first-time digital spenders in Tier 2–4 India. Subscriptions drive steady cash flows from high-frequency users, while microtransactions lower the barrier for casual listeners testing new genres. Few content platforms have managed to execute this dual engine at scale, keeping acquisition efficient, monetisation inclusive, and growth aligned with the realities of India’s consumer internet.

Together, these engines demonstrate how scale can be built in India’s content ecosystem patiently, sustainably, and on the strength of consistent usage.

Inside KukuFM Today

KukuFM’s content footprint now spans over 100,000 hours across 14 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, and English. Its catalogue blends fiction, learning, and spirituality into a continuous spectrum of discovery: love stories next to motivational monologues, folklore beside fantasy series, crime thrillers adjacent to self-help and finance explainers.

This balance between entertainment and utility has anchored user engagement. A large share of total listening on KukuFM comes from repeat users, with over 90% of listening time attributed to exclusive IPs, content owned, produced, or co-developed by KukuFM itself. Much of this efficiency is powered by the company’s AI-enabled content studio, which streamlines everything from scripting and production to testing and discovery. By combining creative depth with scalable execution, KukuFM has built a strategic moat, reducing churn and strengthening brand affinity in India’s crowded content market, where platform loyalty is rare.

With over 100 million downloads and a fast-growing subscriber base, KukuFM exemplifies how deep localisation, disciplined product execution, and creative experimentation can coexist at scale.

Enter Kuku TV: India’s Short-Form Juggernaut

While KukuFM represents the maturation of India’s audio economy, Kuku TV marks the company’s expansion into the fastest-growing frontier of digital media, microdrama.

Launched in early 2025 as a short-video OTT platform, Kuku TV has rapidly become one of India’s most downloaded entertainment apps. In just four months, it was the number one app on India’s App Store, ranked among the global top five Android apps, and held the title of India’s most downloaded app for 30 consecutive days since its launch.

Kuku TV’s rise mirrors a global surge in microdramas, short, high-intensity series that first took off in China’s duǎnjù market, now valued at around $7 billion. This format has reshaped how audiences consume entertainment, favouring fast-paced narratives optimised for mobile viewing. While the trend is spreading globally through platforms like ReelShort, India’s adaptation has found its own rhythm. Kuku TV leads this evolution through deep localisation, culturally rooted storytelling, and strong audience engagement, carving out a distinct space in the country’s fast-emerging short-form entertainment landscape.

Three factors underpin this boom. First, India’s 800 million smartphone users are driving a decisive shift toward snackable content that fits micro-moments. Second, microdramas are fast and economical to produce, with episodes often shot within weeks, and AI tools automating dubbing and post-production. Third, monetisation models are multiplying, from freemium and tipping to pay-per-episode formats, offering deeper engagement than legacy OTT models.

Kuku TV’s early advantage lies in its parent platform’s foundation. By drawing on KukuFM’s user insights, creator networks, and distribution infrastructure, the team has executed at exceptional speed. Each series is editorially tight, scripted for emotional payoff, designed for bingeability, and optimised for discovery.

Together, these dynamics place Kuku TV at the centre of India’s microdrama surge, a category that is defining how new-age entertainment in India is being built: mobile-first, language-rich, and economically scalable.

From Product to Platform: Backing KukuFM’s Multi-Format Growth Story

KukuFM and Kuku TV together illustrate how India’s digital entertainment is evolving from imported formats to home-grown, multi-format ecosystems.

The traditional segmentation of content such as cinema, television, OTT, and UGC no longer defines consumption. Instead, audiences navigate fluidly between platforms, devices, and languages. The new competition is not between mediums but between moments of attention. In this landscape, success depends less on spectacle and more on habitual engagement, precisely the space KukuFM has occupied through audio and now extended through video.

The company’s growth also signals the maturation of India’s creator and IP economy. By investing in owned formats and using technology to industrialise storytelling, KukuFM is developing repeatable intellectual property franchises that can travel across audio and video.

For the broader ecosystem, this represents a shift in how Indian content platforms think about scalability. Instead of mimicking Western OTT economics, they are crafting monetisation around the nuances of India’s value-conscious but high-engagement user base. The result is sustainable growth built on real usage rather than speculative virality.

KukuFM’s journey reflects the growing maturity of India’s startup ecosystem, where scale is built through insight, efficiency, and sustained execution. Its progress, grounded in operational discipline and regional depth, shows how durable businesses can be built with clarity of focus and measured innovation.

At 3one4 Capital, we partnered with KukuFM early on, driven by the belief that India’s next digital frontier is being shaped by its language internet, where audio and video are emerging as powerful mediums for learning and storytelling. That conviction has since evolved into a broader thesis that the most enduring Indian platforms will be multi-format, AI-enabled, and deeply attuned to the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

Today, KukuFM and Kuku TV represent that vision. Their growth underscores how India’s defining media platforms are being built on sustained usage and real engagement rather than short-term scale. At 3one4 Capital, we are proud to have been part of this journey, one that reflects and amplifies India’s creative confidence on a global stage.
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