Abu Dhabi’s ADIA explores investment in India’s Pocket FM, sources say
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe talks for the new round, which have been ongoing for more than a month, follows Pocket FM recently securing about $100 million in a separate round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the details are not yet public.
ADIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, whereas Pocket FM said it refrains from commenting on market speculations.
Pocket FM — which also counts Tencent, Tanglin and Times Internet among its backers — had publicly set a goal of reaching an ARR of $100 million by 2023-end.
Indian startups experienced a significant decline in large-scale funding rounds last year as prominent crossover funds, including Tiger Global and SoftBank, reduced their investments in India and other markets, while many well-known India-focused funds shifted their attention to backing early-stage startups, Bain said this week.
Several sovereign funds, including ADIA, Temasek, GIC, Qatar Investment Authority, ramped up the pace of their investments last year, cutting large-check sizes to late-stage startups such as PhonePe, Lenskart, and Pharmeasy.
Pocket FM’s expansion into the U.S., and offering customers a non-subscription, pay-as-you-go offering has proven especially successful. Pocket FM operates on a freemium model, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to give users the choice to pay only for content they prefer rather than the entire library.
The startup announced last month that it will invest $40 million to grow its online reading platform Pocket Novel. More than 90,000 writers had signed up to the app in less than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.
Ref: techcrunch
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG