Kuku, the Google-backed Indian storytelling startup, has raised $85 million to expand its push into mobile-first audio and vertical video, further underscoring how competitive the country’s content market has become.
The company will now scale the production of short, serialized “microdramas,” as well as deepen creator payouts and media tooling as global and Indian platforms compete for hours on smartphone screens. It’s a bet that has paid off at just the right time: Today, India has more than a billion internet connections and nearly 700 million smartphone users, and low data costs have made cheap digital content — purchased with instant micropayments — the norm on a national scale.
Digital media has leapfrogged over television as the largest distributor of entertainment in India, contributing approximately 32% of revenues for the industry, according to EY’s latest media and entertainment outlook. EY also forecasts digital to grow at a double-digit compound pace through the next several years, and that momentum has further sparked investor interest.
Why The Moneybags Are Betting On A Wordy Stream In India
Short-form storytelling, optimized for vertical viewing, is evolving as attention fragments. Meta has been testing microdrama series for Gen Z in India, and regional players are racing to lock in creators and catalogs across Hindi and local language content.
Kuku has two flagship products: Kuku TV, which takes a long-form plot and repackages it into bite-sized stories told vertically; and Kuku FM, an audio-first platform that helped the company break through early on. The services have since expanded to over eight Indian languages and have crossed 10 million paid subscribers, a sharp increase from the last publicly disclosed figure of around two million in 2023.
The company tells me average revenue per user has doubled since its last round, with overall business growth clocking in at 10x during that period of time. Some 80% of its paying users are from beyond India’s biggest metros, a good reminder of both local language and affordable plans in the pursuit to scale.
Inside Kuku’s Numbers: Subscriptions, Usage, Payouts
On subscription costs, Kuku charges:
- ₹199/month
- ₹499/quarter
- ₹1,499/year
with the quarterly tier seeing maximum conversions. People spend about 100 minutes a day on the platforms, and over nine in 10 continue to use them month after month, according to company data.
Output is the centrepiece of the creator ecosystem. Kuku does business with around 10,000 creators — over half from smaller cities — and disburses around ₹400 million in payouts every month. And all of that depth helps power an always flowing pipeline of local-language audio series and video episodes.
Appfigures estimates indicate Kuku apps have surpassed 229 million lifetime downloads (approximately 122 million for Kuku FM and 88 million for Kuku TV). Consumer spending on the apps has now surpassed $4 million and 2025 brought with it 134 million downloads (which is more than 5x year-over-year) and $1.9 million in spend, up over 150%.
AI-Enhanced Production and Creator Economics
To speed development time, Kuku has created a generative AI studio that combines software from vendors like OpenAI and ElevenLabs with in-house tools. The system helps with multilingual translation, plot outlines and script drafts, dialogue polish; it even does rapid-turn ad assets and thumbnails.
The company stresses that AI does not autonomously publish shows — final audio and video production is still guided by humans. Even so, 70% to 80% of Kuku’s workflow is now AI-assisted — an edge that can cut down on iteration cycles without breaking the bank in terms of content budgets.
Legal Clouds and a Global Monetized Rival in Focus
The closest competition to Kuku is Pocket FM, which has also staked its claim in the audio and microdrama space. Pocket FM has sued Kuku for copyright infringement in multiple cases, and a recent order from the Delhi High Court has temporarily restrained Kuku from releasing new episodes of several disputed shows.
Kuku says it uses manual copyright review teams and has developed detection tools to flag allegedly infringing third-party content, with a view toward investing part of the new round in beefing up rights management systems as well. Such investment is wise, as platforms move toward scaling user-generated and semi-professional pipelines across all languages.
Competitive benchmarks reveal contrasting strategies. Most of Pocket FM’s downloads come from India, but according to Appfigures data, the company makes the vast majority of its money outside this territory. Pocket FM’s downloads also dropped last year, by 21% to 38 million, while consumer spending almost doubled to some $100 million — supporting the theory that international markets and increased ARPPU can trump raw download numbers. Kuku, on the other hand, has focused on domestic scale with fast-growing but smaller in-app monetization.
Plans for Expansion and the Road Ahead for Kuku
Kuku plans to use the new capital to invest in AI and data infrastructure, creator partnerships and hire across technology and content. The 150-ish staff is about to grow, as the company locks down its production pipeline and recommendation engines.
(Though India is the core market, Kuku is piloting in the Middle East and United States, with wider U.S. scaling scheduled for 2026.) That’s why scaling abroad will require driving ARPU: this likely means English-first catalogs, stronger localization, tighter subscription funnels (international fiducial ARPU dynamics differ radically from India’s).
Conditions are still good back at home. Data is still among the world’s cheapest, and the Unified Payments Interface run by NPCI (in which all major social-media companies are invested) handles billions of instant transactions every month — a perfect infrastructure for micropaid fiction. Now, with an additional $85 million in the tank, Kuku has the opportunity to turn its download lead around and into a lasting and defensible monetization in India’s crowded mobile content space.
