Audio leisure platform Pocket FM introduced the completion of its first Worker Inventory Possession Plan (ESOP) buyback price $8.3 million on April 1. The buyback witnessed participation from quite a few former and present workers, the corporate disclosed with out offering additional particulars.
“This emphasises our continued dedication to acknowledging the efforts of our groups, and we’re happy that regardless of the difficult financial circumstances, we stay unwavering in providing alternatives for wealth creation and fostering a tradition of progress inside Pocket FM,” co-founder Rohan Nayak stated.
The announcement follows Pocket FM’s current achievement of elevating $103 million in Sequence D funding, valuing the corporate at $750 million in March.
In recent times, many fashionable firms like PhonePe and Swiggy have been providing ESOPs to workers and shopping for them again at engaging costs. This development helps workers, significantly those that joined the corporate early on, construct wealth over time.
Â
Pocket FM, established in 2018 by Nayak, Prateek Dixit, and Nishanth Srinivas, boasts an unlimited library of content material, together with over 100,000 hours of numerous audio content material. This contains over 2,000 unique audio collection and a staggering assortment of greater than 400,000 episodes. The content material covers a variety of genres, together with romance, drama, thriller, fantasy, and science fiction, catering to audiences in each English and Hindi, in addition to varied Indian languages resembling Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi.
Pocket FM supplies customers with free entry to a restricted variety of episodes each 24 hours. To unlock extra content material, customers have the choice to buy digital cash, just like common cell gaming fashions.
As of December, Pocket FM achieved an annualized income charge (ARR) of $150 million globally, completed in lower than two years. This income is rising at a exceptional charge of 57 p.c quarterly. Notably, over $100 million of this income got here from america alone, in keeping with Nayak’s assertion final month.
In February, Pocket FM expanded its choices by launching Pocket Novel, an internet platform for studying novels. This transfer goals to diversify the corporate’s content material choices into different classes and codecs.
To assist this initiative, the Bengaluru-based startup has allotted a $40 million funding. Pocket FM goals to realize a world annual income charge (ARR) of $100 million by 2025 by way of this novel studying platform and its different companies.
