[Funding alert] Kuku FM raises $19.5M in funding round from KRAFTON, others

Audio content platform Kuku FM has raised $19.5 million in Series B funding round from South Korean gaming giant KRAFTON Inc.

In this round many existing and new investors also participated like 3one4 Capital, Vertex Ventures, and India Quotient, with Founder Bank Capital and Verlinvest.

Kuku FM plans to use funds to broaden its language offerings and consolidate content creation, fueling its existing offerings.

“Kuku FM is pioneering a new category for audio content by bringing premium, unique, and immersive digital audio experiences to our users. We have seen an unprecedented consumption of audio content amongst users in our country with 70 percent users coming from Tier II cities. We are excited to witness the evolution of this genre.” Said, Lal Chand Bisu, Co-founder & CEO, Kuku FM.

Mumbai based audio content platform Kuku FM was founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena, and Vikas Goyal. It offer contents across 50+ genres in 5+ languages like Hindi, English, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil  in India for all user segments ranging from age group 6 to 60+ years and it has more than 10 million downloads and 300K+ paid subscribers.

“We are very excited to partner with Kuku FM and support them in their journey of building a strong creator and listener ecosystem which continues to grow at an amazing pace creating many unique local IPs. Here at KRAFTON Inc., we strongly believe that Indian IPs and regional Indian languages content growth will unlock the next big monetization opportunity not just in India but even globally in the long term, and the Kuku FM team is best placed to capture this opportunity in the audio category.” said, Sean Hyunil Sohn, Head of India Division at KRAFTON, Inc.

Kuku FM hosts 150,000 hours of content with audio-books, stories, book summaries, courses, and podcasts on its platform.